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CHRISTIANITY AND IDEALISM 



■*&&&■ 



Christianity and Idealism 



The Christian Ideal of Life in its Relations 

to the Greek and Jewish Ideals and 

to Modern Philosophy 



BY 



JOHN WATSON, LL.D. 

PROFESSOR OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY IN QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY 
KINGSTON, CANADA 



NEW EDITION, WITH ADDITIONS 






Neto fgotft K t o'^ 






THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD. 
1897 

All rights reserved 



^ 



\8>\ 



Copyright, 1896, 
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 

Copyright, 1897, 
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set up and electrotyped December, 1896. Reprinted, with additions, 
August, 1897. 



13L-M ( 3 5 5* 



Nortoooto $ress 

J. S. Cushing & Co. - Berwick & Smith 
Norwood Mass. U.S.A. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Preface to the Second Edition . . . . . vii 

Introductory Preface xxi 

Part I 

THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE IN RELATION TO 
THE GREEK AND JE WISH IDEALS 

CHAPTER I 
Historical Connexion of Morality and Religion . . i 

CHAPTER II 
The Greek Ideal 23 

CHAPTER III 
The Jewish Ideal 45 

CHAPTER IV 
The Christian Ideal 60 

CHAPTER V 

Medieval Christianity no 

v 




vi CONTENTS 



Part II 

MODERN IDEALISM IN ITS RELATION TO THE 
CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

CHAPTER VI 

PAGE 

General Statement and Defence of Idealism . . .121 



CHAPTER VII 

Idealism in relation to Agnosticism and the Special 

Sciences 153 

CHAPTER VIII 
The Failure of Materialism 192 

CHAPTER IX 
The Idealistic Interpretation of Natural Evolution . 216 

CHAPTER X 
Idealism and Human Progress 237 

CHAPTER XI 
Idealism and Christianity .256 



PREFACE TO THE SECOND 
EDITION 

In the present edition of this little work, 
while the first part has been left unchanged, 
the second part has been enlarged by the addi- 
tion of three new chapters (the eighth, ninth, 
and tenth) and the intercalation of a dozen 
pages (pp. 268-280) in the last chapter of the 
book. The eighth chapter seeks to exhibit the 
inadequacy of Materialism, by showing that 
the Atomism upon which it rests is inconsis- 
tent both with science and with philosophy, and 
that in its struggle to reach consistency it ac- 
complishes its own euthanasia. It is from no 
desire to gain an easy victory over the crudest 
of all philosophical theories that space has 
been occupied in discussing its pretensions, 
but simply as a step in the orderly advance to 
a more adequate theory, and as an illustration 
of the double function which philosophy dis- 
charges: firstly, in freeing the fundamental 



viii PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION 

ideas of science from inconsistency, and, sec- 
ondly, in re-interpreting them from the point 
of view of the whole. In the chapter which 
follows, the same method is employed in the 
estimate of the evolutionary account of the 
world. In the tenth chapter an attempt is 
made to distinguish human progress from the 
prior stages of evolution, and to show that 
it presupposes the existence of a self-conscious 
or self-determining Principle as the ultimate 
source and explanation of reality in all its 
forms. The incidental discussion in this con- 
nexion of the main thesis of Mr. Kidd's Social 
Evolution — a thesis which I regard as demon- 
strably false — will, I hope, help to throw into 
relief the idealistic conception of human life 
as the progressive evolution of self-conscious 
reason. In the passage added to the last chap- 
ter I have tried to explain why I cannot accept 
the view that the Absolute may be super- 
rational, and to indicate, more clearly than was 
done in the former edition, what I regard as 
the true relation of the human to the divine 
spirit. I am only sorry that the plan of the 
work does not allow me to enter more thor- 



PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION' i x 

oughly into the discussion of the last question, 
which is perhaps the most pressing metaphysi- 
cal problem of the present day. 

The additional matter contained in this 
edition will help to fill out the somewhat 
meagre outline of Idealism given in the for- 
mer edition. But I am still only too con- 
scious of the inadequacy of the discussion. 
The present work is merely the preparation 
for a system of philosophy, and cannot but 
share in the inevitable defects of every attempt 
to present the results of philosophical reflec- 
tion in a general form. At every step in its 
onward march philosophy sets its foot upon 
ashes beneath which fierce fires glow. Our 
age, as Kant said of his own, is an " age of 
criticism," when even the most cherished con- 
victions must submit to the "free and open 
scrutiny of reason"; and therefore any one who 
apparently ignores or makes light of difficulties 
which to some of his contemporaries seem of 
a formidable character is apt to be charged 
with superficiality, indifference, or dogmatism. 
I do not deny that many of the objections 
which have been urged against Idealism seem 



x PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION 

to me to be due mainly to misunderstanding, 
but I think I may claim that I have in no 
case been untrue to the free but austere spirit 
of philosophy, — a spirit which is hostile to all 
dogmatic utterances and acknowledges no 
authority but reason. If Idealism is to become 
but a new form of dogmatism, the life will go 
out of it, and only an empty husk will be left 
behind. We cannot even find an authoritative 
basis for truth in what Mr. Balfour calls our 
"ethical needs"; for these "needs" themselves 
require justification. Nor can I believe that 
any fruitful results can be reached by seeking 
to reinstate the "primacy of practical reason," 
or by falling back upon the vague formula 
that "life is more than thought." Reason 
cannot be divided against itself without self- 
contradiction, and the " life " which excludes 
" thought " is so much the poorer for its ex- 
clusiveness. Those who are fond of quoting 

Goethe's 

" Grau, theurer Freund, ist alle Theorie, 
Und grlin des Leben's goldner Baum," 

should remember that the words are put into 
the mouth of Mephistopheles, "der Geist der 



PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION x i 

stets verneint," when he is in a mocking 
humour. To those who imagine, as Mr. Bal- 
four in his Foundations of Belief seems to 
do, that faith can be based upon a suicidal dis- 
trust of reason, I would commend the words 
of a great master in speculation, who is more 
frequently decried than read. 

"There is at present," says Hegel, "a strenu- 
ous and almost impassioned effort to rescue 
men, collectively and individually, from their 
immersion in the life of sense, and to turn 
their eyes to the stars ; as if they were entirely 
forgetful of the divine, and were about to con- 
tent themselves, like the worm, with dust and 
water. Once they had a heaven, furnished 
with a rich store of thoughts and images. 
The significance of the actual lay in the thread 
of light by which it was attached to heaven; 
guided by this thread, the eye, instead of 
dwelling upon what was immediately before it, 
sped onward to the divine Reality, — to what 
might be called the present yonder. The 
eye of the soul had to be forced to look 
towards the earth, and much time and effort 
were needed to impart the clearness of heaven 



xii PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION 

to the darkness and confusion in which the 
sensible was enveloped. What seems to be 
needed now is just the opposite: so firmly is 
the soul attached to the earth, that an equal 
force is required to lift it to the things above. 
The spirit is so poor, that, like the traveller 
in the desert, who thirsts for a simple draught 
of water, it seems to long but for the bare 
feeling of the divine to refresh it. When the 
spirit can be satisfied with so little, we can 
easily estimate how great has been its loss. 
. . . But, in truth, spiritual force is to be 
measured by its expression: its depth is only 
so deep as it dares to expand and to lose 
itself in its manifestations. When those who 
claim that truth is revealed in an immediate 
intuition pretend that they have penetrated 
to the very heart of reality, and that they 
alone are the exponents of a true and pious 
philosophy, they are unaware that, instead of 
offering up their desires to God, by their con- 
tempt for precise and definite ideas they are 
in reality the victim of their own arbitrary 
conceits. Because they envelope their self- 
consciousness in mist, and forego the use of 



PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION x iii 

their intellect, they fondly imagine that they 
are ' the beloved ' to whom God ' giveth wis- 
dom in sleep.' It hardly needs to be said 
that what comes to them in sleep are merely 
dreams." # 

Philosophy, as I understand it, must refuse 
all weak compromises. It is not a thing of 
the chair, or even an instrument for preserving 
the threatened interests of civilisation, but a 
resolute and independent effort to grasp the 
true nature of the real ; and no one can 
live in its spirit who is not willing to follow 
the lead of ideas with docility and singleness 
of purpose. This, however, does not mean 
that it moves in a region of abstractions ; on 
the contrary, it can be successful in its quest 
for truth, only as it follows the maxim, "im Gan- 
zen, Guten, Schonen resolut zu leben." In this 
effort after comprehensiveness lies the special 
difficulty of its problem. None of the phases 
of human life can be ignored; yet each is so 
complex in itself, while all are so intimately 
related to one another, that it is hard to main- 
tain the proper perspective and assign to each 

* Hegel's Phanomenologie des Geistes> pp. 8, 9. 



xiv PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION 

its due importance. The task would, indeed, 
be impracticable, were it not that the essence 
of the past has been gathered up by succes- 
sive philosophies and presented in the clear 
medium of thought. At the present day, as 
it seems to me, the main problem is to inter- 
pret anew, by the aid of existing philosophies, 
the purified results of science, the highest 
intuitions of art, and the matured religious 
consciousness in a comprehensive and self- 
consistent way. The present volume is a 
small contribution to the solution of that 
problem. 

To prevent misunderstanding, it may be as 
well to add a few words as to the relation of 
the first part of the work to the second. 
The Christian ideal of life, as expressed by its 
Founder, seems to me to require no adven- 
titious support, being in itself intrinsically 
rational ; but we cannot say the same thing 
of every system of doctrine which claims to 
be the sole representative of Christianity. 
The precise degree of truth which is con- 
tained in any given theological creed is a 
matter to be determined by careful investiga- 



PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDIT/OAT xv 

tion, and would require rigorous and extended 
treatment. In the last chapter and in various 
passages throughout the work, I have indi- 
cated, I hope with sufficient clearness, that in 
my opinion the form in which the fundamental 
ideas of Christianity are present in the popu- 
lar consciousness is not adequate to the liv- 
ing truth as it was expressed by the Master ; 
and one object which I had in view in writ- 
ing the work was to disengage the essence of 
Christianity from elements which for histori- 
cal, reasons have come to be regarded as in- 
separable from it, though they are in reality 
antagonistic to its spirit. On the other hand, 
I do not sympathise with those who speak 
of the development of Christian doctrine as 
if it were nothing but an obscuration of primi- 
tive Christianity; much less with those who 
strangely hold that Christianity received its 
ultimate formulation in the Nicene creed. 
These views logically lead to the acceptance 
of the ideas of its Founder, or of the church, 
on mere authority, and therefore contradict 
the spirit and even the words of the Master. 
The ideas of Jesus seem to me, I confess, so 



xvi PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION 

penetrative and profound that I am unable 
to conceive of anything higher in principle ; 
but, like all fruitful ideas, their full meaning 
can be grasped only when they are viewed in 
the light of the whole development of human- 
ity in all its phases. I cannot believe that 
the Christian conception of life will ever be 
transcended; but I should have to shut my 
eyes to obvious facts, were I to deny that it 
has undergone development and must undergo 
further development as time goes on. For 
development is not mere change, but the liv- 
ing process by which a fruitful principle 
reveals the breadth and depth of its power. 
In this process the speculations of Christian 
thinkers, from St. Paul downwards, have had 
their place, and no mean or unimportant place; 
and I do not think that a time will ever come 
when philosophical reflection upon these high 
themes shall have said its last word. Such 
reflection must be free and untrammelled, or 
it is almost worthless. Philosophy, it is true, 
is somewhat slow-footed, and to certain minds 
its method is cold and distasteful, especially 
when it is predominantly analytic, as Goethe 



PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION X vii 

complained that it is apt to be. I confess to 
a certain sympathy with those who take this 
view ; but I think that what offends them is 
not so much philosophy itself, as certain phi- 
losophies which, from various causes, fall into 
abstraction, and not least those which live in 
the atmosphere of common sense or the rarer 
atmosphere of the special sciences. It is be- 
cause Idealism, as here set forth, seems to 
me to express in terms of thought what in 
religion and in the highest art is expressed 
in terms of feeling and imagination, that I 
venture to commend it to those who feel the 
need, in an age of reflection, of being true to 
the intellect as well as the heart. Surely it 
is almost a truism that the only convincing 
Apologia which in these days can be made 
for a religion is to give adequate grounds for 
holding it to be fundamentally rational. If 
this thesis were really indefensible, there can 
be little doubt that Christianity must some 
day be added to the list of " creeds outworn. " 
The additional matter contained in this vol- 
ume was recently given as part of a course 
of lectures, delivered before the Theological 



xviii PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION 

Alumni Association of the university with 
which I have the honour to be connected. 
For the last few years it has been my duty 
to give a short course of lectures on some 
topic bearing upon the relations of philosophy 
and theology. This lectureship was instituted 
by Sir Sandford Fleming, C.M.G., the Chan- 
cellor of Queen's University, and it is with 
special pleasure that I take this public oppor- 
tunity of thanking him for the stimulus which 
it has given to my own studies. It is proper 
to add that, as I am allowed perfect free- 
dom in the choice of a subject, the lectures of 
this session were written with a view to their 
subsequent publication as part of this book, 
should a second edition be called for. In their 
preparation I have been indebted to Stallo's 
Concepts and Theories of Modern Physics, 
Herbert's Realistic Assumptions of Modern 
Science, Paulsens Introduction to Philosophy, 
and one or two recent articles of Dr. Le 
Conte. In a more indirect way I have re- 
ceived great aid from Mr. Bradley's Appear- 
ance and Reality, which seems to me the most 
suggestive and original metaphysical work of 



PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION xix 

our day. While I agree with many of the criti- 
cisms of defective theories made by these writers, 
I am unable to accept their positive philosophy 
as a whole, though I regard them as each in his 
own way contributing to that general idealistic 
view of the world, which, as I believe, is cer- 
tain to survive by its intrinsic reasonableness. 

I am happy to be able to supplement the 
criticism of Transcendental Geometry con- 
tained in Chapter VII by one or two passages 
from a paper read before the Royal Society of 
Canada by a distinguished mathematician. " It 
is argued," says Professor N. F. Dupuis, " that 
a four-dimensional space may possibly be pro- 
jective into a figure of three dimensions. " This 

analogy " proves nothing whatever A plane 

can be projected into a line only when the plane 
to be projected is normal to the plane of pro- 
jection. But it is impossible to know, from 
anything in the nature of the projection itself, 
whether the original was higher or of the same 
dimensions as the projection. . . . Reasoning 
from analogy, all that we are justified in saying 
is, that, if there ^be such a thing as a four- 
dimensional space, our solid figures may possi- 
bly be projections from figures in that space, 



xx PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION 

although we fail to conceive how such a projec- 
tion could be effected. But we are certainly 
not justified in assuming that there is a four- 
dimensional space, unless we can first know 
something about the nature of a figure in such 
space. ... It is said that the mathematician 
frequently works upon the assumption of a four- 
dimensional space, as when he employs four 
co-ordinates for the sake of homogeneity, and 
in many similar operations. Now, in the oper- 
ations here referred to, the mathematician is 
employing the symbolic language of algebra, in 
which the symbols stand for and denote quan- 
tities or magnitudes and operations, which by 
a circumlocution can always be expressed in 
words. . . . To say that, because x* denotes 
the square on the line-segment x, and x? denotes 
the cube on the same, therefore x 4 must denote 
a four-dimensional figure of equal dimensions 
on the line-segment, is no proof of anything, 
unless we assume, to begin with, that every 
homogeneous algebraic expression must have 
an interpretation in real geometry, which is a 
glaring example of petitio principii" 

Queen's University, Kingston, Canada, 
26th July, 1897. 



INTRODUCTORY PREFACE 

The present work has grown out of lect- 
ures recently delivered before the Philosophi- 
cal Union of the University of California. 
What is called Part I. is the expansion of a 
lecture on " The Greek and Christian Ideals 
of Life/' and the remainder contains the sub- 
stance of two lectures in defence of Idealism, 
with a good deal of additional matter. 

The historical matter of the first part does 
not pretend to be a complete presentation of 
the development of religion. It was my first 
intention to attempt such a presentation, but 
I soon found that it was impossible to com- 
press so abundant a material within the limits 
assigned to me, and I have therefore con- 
fined myself to a statement of the general 
course of religious development, with a more 
particular consideration of the Greek and 
Jewish ideals of life, as compared with the 



xxii INTRODUCTORY PREFACE 

Christian. In treating of these topics, I have 
avoided all polemical discussion, aiming rather 
to give the results of many years of reading 
and reflection, than to occupy space with a 
consideration of conflicting views. The chap- 
ter on the Christian Ideal is based upon a 
study of the synoptic gospels, as read in the 
light of modern historical and philosophical 
criticism. Here, above all, it seemed advisable 
to avoid as far as possible all purely doc- 
trinal topics, concentrating attention entirely 
upon the conception of life which may be, as 
I think, constructed from the sayings of Jesus 
himself. I am by no means indifferent to the 
development by theologians of the fundamental 
ideas of the Founder of Christianity, but it 
seems to me that the wonderful power and 
persuasiveness of those ideas is most apparent 
when they are exhibited in their naked purity. 
It seems almost necessary to say a word 
or two upon the use of the term " Idealism." 
The objection has been raised that no school 
of thought has an exclusive right to the title. 
In answer to this objection perhaps I can- 
not do better than try to explain why I 



INTRODUCTORY PREFACE xxiii 

think the term " Idealism " may be fairly 
employed to designate the general theory 
which is here advocated. 

I presume it will be admitted that the 
originator of the philosophical doctrine of 
Idealism was Plato, and that Plato conceived 
of the first principle of all things as reason 
(NoGs), also maintaining that it is in virtue of 
reason, as distinguished from sensible percep- 
tion, that man obtains a knowledge of that 
principle. Now, modern Idealism, as I under- 
stand it, agrees with Plato on these two 
points, and therefore its claim to the name 
does not seem either arrogant or unreason- 
able. No system has a right to call itself 
" idealistic," in the Platonic sense, which does 
not in some form accept the doctrine of 
the rationality and knowability of the real. 
Applying this test, we must exclude Agnosti- 
cism, which denies that we can know the 
real as it is in itself; Scepticism, which re- 
fuses to admit that we can make any abso- 
lute affirmation whatever, either positive or 
negative ; and Sensationalism or Empiricism, 
which finds in the sensible and its custom- 



xxiv INTRODUCTORY PREFACE 

ary modes of conjunction the only knowable 
world. To call by the name of Idealism, as 
is sometimes done, a doctrine which reduces 
all knowable reality to individual states or 
feelings, is surely an unwarrantable use of 
the term. 

If it is said that, interpreted in the wide 
sense here given to it, Idealism must include 
systems differing so greatly as those of Des- 
cartes and Hegel, or of Spinoza and Lotze, 
I entirely agree. The systems of Descartes, 
Spinoza, Leibnitz, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, 
Hegel, and Lotze all seem to me to be forms 
of Idealism, and the only question is how 
far any of them can claim to be true to the 
principle that " the real is rational." The 
test, therefore, of an idealistic philosophy is 
its ability to provide a system of ideas which 
shall best harmonise with the principle upon 
which Idealism is based ; or, rather, the suc- 
cess of an idealistic philosophy must consist 
in its ability to prove that " the real is 
rational," and that man is capable of knowing 
it to be rational. I am very far from affirm- 
ing that the hurried sketch of an idealistic 



INTRODUCTORY PREFACE xxv 

philosophy here presented fulfils that demand : 
all that is attempted is to expose the irrele- 
vancy of certain objections which have been 
made from a misunderstanding of what Ideal- 
ism affirms, and to indicate the main line of 
thought which it must follow, and the main 
conclusions to which it leads. 

It may help to indicate the points in which 
Idealism, as here presented, differs from some 
of the great historical forms which it has 
assumed, if I state wherein these seem to be 
defective. In doing so, it will not be possi- 
ble to enter into detail, or to support by rea- 
soned proof the conclusions to which I have 
been led. I shall therefore have to assume 
a general acquaintance with the history of 
philosophy on the part of the reader, and I 
beg him to take the criticisms which I shall 
make simply as results, the evidence for which 
I hope to give in detail on another occasion. 

Plato may be called the Father of Idealism, 
though, no doubt, his doctrine was a develop- 
ment from the Idealism implied in the Nous 
of Anaxagoras, and still more clearly in the 
Socratic view of universals. How far, then, 



xxvi INTRODUCTORY PREFACE 

may it be said that Plato was untrue to his 
central idea of the rationality and knowability 
of the real ? His main defect, as it seems 
to me, was in virtually opposing the real to 
the actual or so-called " sensible." This 
defect is obvious in his theory, or one of his 
theories, that Art consists in the " imitation " 
of ordinary "sensible" actuality. The simi- 
lar defect in his Philosophy of Religion it 
will not be necessary to exhibit here, as I 
have dealt with it in the body of the work ; 
but a word may be said in regard to his 
defective Theory of Knowledge. Just as 
Plato at last rejects Art on the ground that 
it only represents or imitates the " sensible," 
so he shows a decided tendency to separate 
the universal from the particular. He does, 
indeed, maintain that whatever is real must 
be self-active ; but in separating reason, as 
it exists in us, from sensible perception, he 
virtually empties reason of all content, and 
makes its objects pure abstractions. 

The philosophy of Aristotle is beset by 
similar defects, though in him the contrast 
of the real or ideal and the actual is less 



INTRODUCTORY PREFACE xxvii 

rigid and is more obviously in process of 
being transcended. Like Plato, he starts 
from the " mimetic " theory of Art, but he 
is led to make assertions which are contra- 
dictory of his starting-point. Thus he 
virtually asserts (i) that Art is such an in- 
terpretation of the actual as serves to bring 
out its deeper meaning, (2) that it gives rise 
to a feeling of self-harmony, and (3) that its 
object is spiritual forces in their deepest 
reality. Yet, since he never abandoned the 
view that Art is an " imitation " of the 
sensible, it cannot be said that he attained to 
a self-consistent theory. The reason for this 
discrepancy comes to light in his Philosophy 
of Religion, where he does not get beyond 
the idea of God as a self-centred Being, and 
is therefore forced to conceive of the world 
as related to God in an external or arbitrary 
way. Similarly, in his Theory of Knowledge, 
he shrinks from the admission that the actual 
is rational. There is always in things, as he 
thinks, a recalcitrant element or " matter," 
which is the source of " contingency " or 
" chance." It is not merely that human 



xxviii INTRODUCTORY PREFACE 

knowledge cannot completely comprehend 
the actual, but the actual is itself imperfect, 
and therefore the ideal " forms " as they 
exist for the divine reason, being entirely 
free from "matter," are essentially different 
from the actual, in which " form " is always 
more or less sunk in " matter." 

When we pass from ancient to modern 
philosophy, we find the same problem of the 
reconciliation of the real and the actual con- 
fronting us ; but the antagonism seems more 
difficult of solution, because the contrast of 
the finite and the infinite has been sharpened 
by the explicit claim of the individual to ac- 
cept nothing which does not commend itself 
to his reason. 

By Descartes, two opposite methods are 
employed, — the method of abstraction and 
the method of definition. In the use of the 
former, he is led to maintain that the only 
permanent or unchanging attribute of body 
is geometrical extension ; in employing the 
latter, he assumes that there are a number 
of real things, each having a definite or 
limited amount of extension. Spinoza turns 



INTRODUCTORY PREFACE xxix 

the former view against the latter, pointing 
out that there is nothing in the idea of pure 
extension which entitles us to conceive of it 
as broken up into parts. There can there- 
fore, he argues, be no individual bodies, but 
only a single substance without parts or 
limits. Leibnitz, again, agrees with Spinoza 
in holding that pure space has no limits, 
but the inference he draws is that space is 
not an attribute of real substance, but a pure 
abstraction, derived from our experience of 
the order which obtains among the confused 
objects of sense. Thus all the spatial deter- 
minations of things, as merely confused ideas, 
have no existence from the point of view of 
thought; a view which converts the actual 
into pure illusion. 

To Descartes it seemed that the human 
mind cannot comprehend the ends which God 
must be supposed to have in creation, and 
therefore he maintained that we must give 
up the vain search for final causes. " All 
God's ends are hidden in the inscrutable abyss 
of his wisdom." Descartes, however, tacitly 
assumed that there are such ends, if only we 



xxx INTRODUCTORY PREFACE 

could discover them. Such a doctrine is mani- 
festly self-contradictory, and therefore Spinoza 
was only following out this side of the Car- 
tesian doctrine to its logical result when he 
denied final causes altogether. Leibnitz, on 
the other hand, refused to admit that human 
knowledge is limited to the orderly movements 
of nature, as both Descartes and Spinoza as- 
sumed, and therefore he maintained that, with- 
out the idea of final cause, or activity directed 
towards an end, we cannot explain the world 
at all. We must therefore conceive of every 
real being or " monad " as self-active and pur- 
posive. Each " monad " is ever striving to 
make explicit what is already contained ob- 
scurely in it, and each " represents " the whole 
world from its own point of view, so that all 
" monads," without any actual connexion with 
one another, harmonise in their perceptions. 
Now (a) it is a pure assumption that there 
are absolutely independent " monads/' in which 
there already exists obscurely all that after- 
wards comes to more or less clear expression; 
an assumption which has no better warrant 
than the preconception that identity is incom- 



INTRODUCTORY PREFACE xxxi 

patible with development, (b) It is equally an 
assumption that each monad " represents " the 
world. On the Leibnitzian hypothesis of 
purely individual beings, each shut up within 
itself, there can be no way of proving that 
there is any world to " represent." The only 
real individuality, as I should maintain, is that 
of a being which knows itself because it 
knows other beings, (c) When he comes to 
explain the " harmony " of the monads with 
one another, Leibnitz has to fall back upon 
the idea of the selective activity of the divine 
will. Out of all the possible worlds which 
lay before the divine mind, that was chosen 
which was the best on the whole. Here, 
therefore, in the final result of the Leibnitz- 
ian philosophy, we see the fundamental dis- 
crepancy which vitiates his w r hole system. 
The actual world after all is not rational, 
but only as rational as God could make it ; 
a theory which leaves us no ground for in- 
ferring the rationality of God at all, but on 
the contrary presupposes an absolute limit 
in the divine mind. Thus the Idealism of 
Leibnitz, suggestive as it is, ultimately breaks 



xxxii INTRODUCTORY PREFACE 

down in contradiction. Can we, then, accept 
the Critical Idealism of Kant? 

I cannot do more here than indicate the 
defects in the philosophy of Kant which 
prevent us from regarding it as final. Its 
fundamental imperfection is the abstract op- 
position of the empirical and the ideal, as if 
the former were not implicitly the latter. 
This opposition meets us first in his theory 
of knowledge, in which a virtual contrast is 
drawn between what is knowable and what 
lies beyond the boundaries of knowledge. 
Such a contrast is ultimately unmeaning. 
The only reality by reference to which we 
can criticise the knowable world of ordinary 
experience is a reality which includes, though 
it further elucidates, that world. Failing to 
recognise this truth, the philosophy of Kant 
is vexed by the perpetual recurrence of self- 
contradiction in some new form, a self-con- 
tradiction which is never finally transcended, 
(i) In the /Esthetic, Kant adopts the com- 
promise, that space and time belong to the 
subject, while individual things in space and 
time are relative to an unknown object. But, 



INTRODUCTORY PREFACE xxxiii 

as these individuals must enter into know- 
ledge, he is compelled to regard the unknown 
object as a mere blank, and such an object 
cannot be contrasted with anything; it is, in 
fact, merely the known world stripped of its 
determinateness and hypostatised. Kant is 
here really criticising the known world by an 
abstract phase of itself, and pronouncing the 
former to be lower instead of higher than 
the latter. The pure object can only be 
regarded as higher than the known world, 
in so far as the spatial and temporal world 
is seen to be a lower form of the knowable 
world. In this sense, no doubt, we may say 
that the undefined object, or thing in itself, 
indicates the world as it exists in idea, i.e. 
the world as completely determined. (2) In 
the Analytic, Kant takes another step in the 
process by which he gives a higher meaning 
to the thing in itself. The whole of the 
knowable world is now shown to involve the 
unifying activity of the knowing subject, 
though with the reservation that the object 
is conceived as the source of the undefined 
"manifold of sense." But, in truth, there is 



xxxiv INTRODUCTORY PREFACE 

no undefined " manifold " for knowledge, and 
hence the thing in itself is, even more pal- 
pably than before, a magni nominis umbra. 
(3) This is partly recognised by Kant him- 
self when he goes on to consider the Un- 
conditioned in its three forms, — the soul, 
the world, and God. (a) His criticism of 
Rational Psychology is virtually a recognition 
of the truth, that the pure or unrelated sub- 
ject is a mere fiction of abstraction. Yet he 
does not draw the proper inference, that the 
real subject exists only in and through its 
relations to the object. Such a subject is 
not mechanically determinable, being self- 
conscious and self-active, but it does not 
and could not exist, were not the system of 
nature what it is. (6) Kant's criticism of 
Rational Cosmology is valid, so far as it 
points out that the reflective understanding 
seeks to affirm one of two related terms as 
if they were mutually exclusive ; but Kant 
does not see that the reconciliation of these 
opposites is possible without recourse being 
had to the unknowable region of " noumena." 
(c) The criticism of Rational Theology is 



INTRODUCTORY PREFACE xxxv 

valid as against the dualistic separation of 
being and thought, the world and God ; but 
Kant's own solution is inadequate, because 
he regards these oppositions as holding ab- 
solutely within the sphere of the knowable, 
whereas they are really oppositions which 
carry their own refutation with them. 

When he passes from the Theoretical to 
the Practical Reason, Kant at last recognises 
that the self-conscious subject is synthetic or 
productive ; in other words, that here the 
real object is not opposed to the subject as 
something unintelligible, but, on the contrary, 
is bound up with the very nature of the 
subject. But the shadow of the " thing in 
itself" still haunts him, and therefore he con- 
ceives this objective world as merely an 
ideal which demands realisation, but which 
can never be realised. The way out of this 
difficulty is to recognise that the ideal is the 
real: that morality is not a mere "beyond," 
but is actually realised objectively in human 
institutions, which themselves have perma- 
nence only as they are in harmony with the 
eternal nature of the world, or, in other 
words, with the nature of God. 



xxxvi INTRODUCTORY PREFACE 

In the Critique of Judgment Kant makes 
a final effort to overcome the dualism with 
which he started. In aesthetic feeling he 
finds a sort of unconscious testimony to the 
unity of the phenomenal and the real, and in 
organised beings he meets with a phase of 
things which refuses to come under the head 
either of the phenomenal or the noumenal. 
Thus, " as by a side gesture," Kant points 
beyond the abstractions of the sensible and 
the supersensible to their actual concrete 
unity; but the preconception with which he 
started prevents him from identifying the 
ideal and the real, and the most he can per- 
suade himself to say is, that man is entitled 
to a rational faith in God, freedom and im- 
mortality, though these are objects which lie 
beyond the range of his knowledge. 

I should be sorry if what has been said 
should suggest the idea that philosophy is 
merely a series of brilliant failures, in which 
each new thinker vainly strives to prove the 
unprovable proposition, that the actual world 
when properly understood is rational ; rather, 
as it seems to me, faith in the rationality of 



INTRODUCTORY PREFACE xxxvii 

the universe is the incentive and presupposi- 
tion of all philosophical progress. Nor are 
the failures of successive philosophies in any 
case absolute ; with each step in advance the 
problem becomes clearer and more easy of 
solution. How far the outline of Idealism 
contained in the second part of this essay 
is free from the objections which I have 
tried to indicate, must be left for the reader 
to determine. Perhaps I may venture to 
say that, if it has any special value, that 
value lies in the attempt to reconcile the 
reality of individual things, and especially 
the freedom and individuality of man, with 
the fundamental principle of Idealism, that the 
actual properly understood is a manifestation 
in various degree of one self-conscious and 
self-determining spiritual Being. 

It would be difficult to enumerate all the 
books to which I have been directly or in- 
directly indebted, especially in the prepara- 
tion of the first part of this essay ; but I 
must not omit to mention the various works 
of the Master of Balliol, and of Professor 
Pfleiderer, as well as Leopold Schmidt's Die 



xxxviii INTRODUCTORY PREFACE 

Ethik der alien Griechen, Mr. J ebb's Growth 
and Influence of Classical Greek Poetry, with 
the introductions in his edition of Sophocles, 
Mr. Bosanquet's History of ^Esthetic, Dr. 
Driver's Introduction to the Literature of the 
Old Testament and Isaiah, Weber's System 
der altsynagogalen paldstinischen Theologie, 
Schiirer's History of the fewish People, Keim's 
Jesus of Nazara, and Weizsacker's Das Aftos- 
tolische Zeitalter. In preparing the chapter 
on the Christian Ideal I also received valu- 
able assistance from my colleague, Professor 
Macnaughton. 

JOHN WATSON. 

Queen's University, Kingston, Canada, 
October i, 1896. 



PART I 

THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE IN 

RELATION TO THE GREEK AND 

JEWISH IDEALS 



THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 



CHAPTER I 

HISTORICAL CONNEXION OF MORALITY AND 
RELIGION 

Christianity, as it issued fresh from the 
mind of its founder, embodied a conception 
of life which brought religion into indissol- 
uble connexion with morality. The whole 
human race was conceived of as in idea a 
single spiritual organism, in which each man 
gains his own perfection by self-conscious 
identification with all the rest, and this com- 
munity of life was held to be possible only 
because man is identical in nature, though 
not in person, with the one divine principle 
which is manifested in all forms of being. 
Man, it was therefore held, is unable to 
come to unity with himself until he has 
surrendered his whole being to the influence 



2 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

of the Holy Spirit. On this view there is 
no basis for the moral ideal, and no possi- 
bility of its realisation, apart from the relig- 
ious ideal ; for man cannot accept as the 
standard of his life an ideal which is not 
in absolute harmony with the ultimate prin- 
ciple of the universe ; nor, even if he did, 
could his effort to realise it be anything but 
the struggle with an alien power too strong 
for him, — a struggle as futile as the attempt 
of the Teutonic giant of the northern Saga 
to lift the deep-seated earth from its foun- 
dations. Affirming that the life of man is 
moral, just in so far as it is in harmony 
with the divine nature, Christianity rests 
upon the belief that "goodness is the nature 
of things," and therefore it maintains that 
evil, which it regards as positive and an- 
tagonistic to good, exists in order to be 
transcended, and must succumb to the all- 
conquering power of goodness. Accordingly, 
man's religious faith, which alone gives mean- 
ing to his moral effort, is for the individual 
the source of a joyous consciousness of unity 
with himself, just because in overcoming the 



CONNEXION OF MORALITY AND RELIGION 3 

world he overcomes his own lower self. It is 
true that the evil which exists without and 
within him can never be completely abol- 
ished, but it is always in process of being 
abolished; and therefore the Christian is en- 
abled to preserve his optimism even in face 
of the worst forms of evil. 

No one will deny that in this triumphant 
faith Jesus and his first followers lived, but 
the objection may be raised, that the simple 
faith of an earlier age is not possible for 
us in these days, or at least not until the 
doubts and perplexities, which the facts of 
experience, the results of science, and the 
deepened reflection of our time inevitably 
suggest, have been fairly weighed and re- 
solved. The wounds of reflection, it may be 
said, are too deep to be healed by a child- 
like faith in God and man, which rests rather 
upon sentiment than upon rational evidence. 
Many will go even further, and maintain that 
morality not only can, but must, be divorced 
from religion, and that in any case it does 
not depend for its support upon any form 
of religious belief. 



4 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

Various reasons may be given for this sep- 
aration of morality from religion, but they 
will all be found to rest ultimately on the 
assumption that it is not possible for man, 
with his limited faculties and knowledge, to 
get behind the veil of phenomena and grasp 
reality as it is in itself. Thus the real be- 
comes simply a name for that which lies 
beyond the range of our finite vision, and 
morality is therefore conceived as merely that 
course of conduct which we must adopt in 
order to make the most of the circumstances 
in which we happen to be placed. So firm 
a hold has this doctrine taken of the mod- 
ern mind, that not merely those who reject 
Christianity, but even some of its professed 
champions, such as Mr. Balfour, regard moral 
ideas as the only foundation upon which even 
a " provisional theory " of life can be based ; 
and we even find Browning, in one of his 
moods, suggesting that the limitation of 
knowledge is essential to the stability and 
progress of morality. 

An attempt will be made, in the second 
part of this essay, to show that religion and 



CONNEXION- OF MORALITY AND RELIGION 5 

morality cannot be separated from each other 
without the destruction of both, and that the 
essential identity of the human and divine 
natures, which is the central idea of Chris- 
tianity, is the legitimate result of philosoph- 
ical reflection. Meantime, it may be pointed 
out that the whole history of man goes to 
show that the connexion of morality with 
religion is so close that no advance in the 
one has ever taken place without a corre- 
sponding advance in the other. What is 
distinctive of Christianity is not the union 
of morality with religion, but the comprehen- 
siveness of the principle upon which that 
union is based. Every religion embodies the 
highest ideal of a people, and the morality 
which corresponds to it is the special form 
in which that ideal is sought to be realised. 
It follows that, when the religious ideal is 
no longer an adequate expression of the 
more developed consciousness of a people, 
the moral ideal is also perceived to be in 
need of revision. Thus the history of re- 
ligion is inseparable from the history of 
morality. 



6 THE CHRISTIAX WEAL OF LIFE 

That relis^on and morality have, as a mat- 
ter of fact, always been connected in the 
close st way, might be proved by a detailed 
examination of the whole history of relisdon ; 
but. as the proof would lead us too far 
ar.r'd, one or two instances where the con- 
ot seems at first sight to be broken will 
have to suffice. 

(i) It has I been maintained that in early 
times relisdon had nothing to do with moral- 
ity. That this view is untenable, it will 
not be difficult to show. One of the ear': — : 
forms of relisrfon is the belief in a orod or 
totem, who is at once some bein? lower than 
man. and yet is regarded as the ancestor of 
a particular family or tribe. The theory of 
Mr. Spencer, that this form of religion orig- 
inated in the worship of ancestors and 
afterwards developed into totemism, cannot 
accepted, because it assumes that primi- 
man was at a higher sta^e of devel- 
opment than his descendants. If prim:: 
man was able to draw a clear distinction 
between himself and lower forms of being, it 
is ^conceivable that his descendants should 



CONNEXION OF MORALITY AND RELIGION 7 

have seen no fundamental distinction between 
them. The truth seems to be that the 
totem, which is almost always a plant, an 
animal, or other natural object, is viewed as 
divine because it forms the medium for that 
haunting sense of something incomprehensi- 
ble and therefore divine, of which even early 
man is not entirely destitute. The totem is 
the form in which this feeling is objectified, 
and it then becomes the vehicle for the ideal 
union of the family or tribe. Thus the re- 
ligion of early man is bound up with the 
elementary moral ideas which rule his life. 
The only social bond of which he can con- 
ceive is that of the family or tribe. More- 
over, the members of each family or tribe, 
while they are closely related to one another, 
are usually hostile to other families or tribes ; 
and hence the morality which corresponds to 
this phase of religion is based upon hatred of 
all who fall beyond its limited range. Here, 
therefore, the correspondence of religion and 
morality is obvious : a religion in which the 
object of worship is common to the members 
of a certain stock naturally goes with a form 



8 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

of morality which involves hatred of the 
members of all other stocks. This hatred, 
as it is inseparable from the moral ideas of 
early man, finds its expression in his relig- 
ion : and hence the totems of other families 
or tribes are regarded as evil spirits, whose 
baneful influence can be counteracted only by 
cunning and magical spells. 

(2) Perhaps it may be conceded that the 
morality of early man is a faithful reflex of 
his religion, but it may be held that their 
connexion is dissolved when an advance has 
been made to a more developed form of 
society. It is easy to understand that, in 
the earlier stages of human history, whatever 
is sanctioned by religion should be blindly 
followed ; but at a more advanced stage, when 
reflection begins to claim its rights, it may 
seem that progress in morality is rather 
hindered than aided by religion. Was it 
religion, it may be asked, which led in Greece 
to the higher morality of the age of Pericles ? 
Would it not be truer to say that the relig- 
ion of Greece was far behind its morality, and 
offered a stubborn resistance to its progress? 



CONNEXION OF MORALITY AND RELIGION 9 

" The Greek poets," as Mr. Max Miiller says, 
" had an instinctive aversion to anything ex- 
cessive or monstrous, yet they would relate 
of their gods what would make the most 
savage of Red Indians creep and shudder." 
Does not this fact clearly show that morality 
advances independently of religion, and may 
even be in conflict with it ? 

The answer to this argument for the sepa- 
ration of morality and religion is not far 
to seek. The moral ideas of the age of 
Pericles were no doubt antagonistic to the 
older religious ideas preserved in Greek my- 
thology, but they were in perfect harmony 
with the religious ideas which really ruled 
the best minds. The sanctity which attaches 
to religion long preserves traditional forms of 
belief from being openly assailed, but this is 
quite consistent with a transformation of the 
whole spirit of the earlier faith. In estimat- 
ing the character of a religion we must in all 
cases make allowance for the survival of 
ideas which have lost their power and mean- 
ing, and concentrate our attention upon the 
new content which is preserved in the old 



IO THE CHRIST/ A IV IDEAL OF LIFE 

earthen vessels. The application of this prin- 
ciple, which is universal in its range, is in 
the present case obvious. The Greek relig- 
ion, like the religion of every progressive 
people, was in continuous process of develop- 
ment; but in its later phases it retained 
elements which, though they were not ex- 
plicitly rejected, occupied a very subordinate 
place and were practically ignored. The real 
religious beliefs of Greece in the age of 
Pericles were embodied, not in its mythology, 
but in the interpretation of the legends given 
by Pindar, ^Eschylus, and Sophocles. When 
this is once seen, it becomes obvious that 
the religion of Greece, so far from being at 
any time on a lower plane than its morality, 
was in all cases an expression of the highest 
ideal of which the Greek was capable, an ideal 
which he was seeking to realise in the various 
forms of his social life. 

(3) As the morality of Greece seems at 
first sight to be in advance of its religion, 
so it may appear that the religious ideal of 
the Jews is entirely divorced from their moral 
conceptions. The continual refrain of their 



CONNEXION OF MORALITY AND RELIGION 1 1 

great prophets, especially those of the eighth 
century, is that Israel, while she accepts the 
lofty ideal of God revealed long ago to their 
fathers, has, in practice, forsaken the Lord, 
and is governed by the lowest ethical ideal. 
When, however, we penetrate beneath the 
form of the prophetic utterances, it becomes 
obvious that the Jews are no exception to 
the rule that the moral and religious ideas 
of a people are the precise counterpart of 
each other. The Jewish prophet refers the 
higher conception of God, with which he 
is himself inspired, to an original revelation 
given by God to his people in the past, 
while in truth that conception has been 
gradually evolved out of a lower and cruder 
form of faith. It is no doubt true that the 
religious ideal upon which he insists is far 
in advance of the moral ideas of his time, 
but it is equally in advance of its religious 
ideas. The mass of the Jewish people had 
never freed themselves from the earlier idea 
of a tribal god who was gracious to Israel 
and terrible to her enemies; and hence their 
morality was not in harmony with that ideal 



12 THE CHRISTIAN- IDEAL OF LIFE 

of an absolutely holy God, " of purer eyes 
than to behold iniquity," which had disclosed 
itself in the higher consciousness of the 
prophets. The religious conceptions of the 
Jewish people as a whole were, therefore, in 
entire harmony with their moral conceptions. 
The contradiction is not between a pure and 
lofty religion and a low moral ideal, but be- 
tween the lower ideal, religious and moral, 
beyond which the people had not advanced, 
and the higher ideal embodied in the pro- 
phetic utterances. It is no doubt a radical 
distinction between the Greek and the Jew- 
ish religion, that the former was simply an 
idealised transcript of society as it actually 
existed, while the latter, in its higher form, 
was a picture of a righteous kingdom that 
was placed in some far-off future ; but this 
distinction, important as it is, does not im- 
ply that the Jewish religion created a di- 
vorce between the ideal and the actual. For, 
though the prophets continually speak of a 
time when Israel shall " return " to the Lord, 
this " return " is in reality an advance to a 
higher form of religion and morality. The 



CONNEXION OF MORALITY AND RELIGION 13 

ideal of the future is always conceived to 
consist in a religious reformation which will 
manifest itself in a moral regeneration; and 
though, at a very late age, the hope of de- 
liverance from outward and inward evil by 
a natural process of development had been 
lost, the Jewish mind never entirely aban- 
doned its belief in the triumph of good and 
the destruction of evil. It is thus evident 
that throughout the whole history of Israel 
religion was in the most intimate connexion 
with morality. 

Without seeking further to elaborate a 
point which seems almost self-evident, it 
may now be assumed that as a matter of 
historical fact there never has been any real 
antagonism between the religion and the 
morality of a people, but, on the contrary, 
the most intimate connexion. How, indeed, 
should it be otherwise, since every religion 
is an attempt to prevent the life of man 
from dissolving into a chaos of fragments 
by referring it to a principle which reduces 
it to order and coherence ? There can be 
no morality without the belief in a life higher 



14 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

than sense and passion, and this belief must 
draw its support from faith in a divine prin- 
ciple which ensures victory to the higher 
life. We must not forget, however, that re- 
ligion, like morality, is a process which can 
reach its goal only when the divine princi- 
ple is so comprehensive that it explains the 
whole of life, and leaves no difficulty un- 
solved. Thus the religious and moral ideals 
of a people, though they sum up all that 
is best and noblest in its life, may fall far 
short of an ultimate explanation. That nei- 
ther the Greek nor the Jewish ideal had 
reached a satisfactory conception of the true 
nature and relation of God, man, and the 
world, it will not be hard to show; and it 
is therefore obvious that a higher synthesis 
was imperatively demanded. But the impor- 
tant question, it will be said, is not whether 
Greece and Judea failed, — a proposition no 
one is likely to dispute, — but whether Chris- 
tianity is not also another, even if it be a 
more splendid, failure. That this is the only 
really important question for us may be at 
once admitted, but it will hardly be denied 



CONNEXION OF MORALITY AND RELIGION 1 5 

that a clear conception of what the Christian 
ideal of life in its permanent essence is, and 
wherein its superiority to other ideals con- 
sists, is a necessary preparation for an intelli- 
gent estimate of its claim to be the ultimate 
ideal of life. To answer these questions thor- 
oughly would involve a critical estimate of 
all the religions of the world. In the pres- 
ent essay, nothing so ambitious will be at- 
tempted; but perhaps a careful examination 
and comparison of the Greek, Jewish, and 
Christian ideals of life may be as convincing 
as a wider survey. 

Before entering upon this task it may help 
to illustrate somewhat more fully the thesis 
of the present chapter, that religion and 
morality have always developed pari passu, 
if we glance at the different paths which the 
religious consciousness has followed among 
different peoples, and the goal which they 
have severally attained. 

There seems reason to believe that all re- 
ligions are either totemistic or have devel- 
oped from totemism. We may, therefore, 
regard this form of religion as, if not the 



1 6 THE CHRISTrAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

earliest, at least a very early form of religion. 
Traces of it are found even in those nations 
in which civilisation originated, and which 
reached a much higher ideal of life, such as 
the Chinese, the Indian, the Greek, and the 
Jewish ; and indeed it is, as we have seen, 
the natural form in which the ideal of the 
family or the tribe is embodied, since that 
ideal is based entirely upon the tie of blood. 
We may thus regard totemism as the orig- 
inal matrix from which all other forms of 
religion were developed. 

Totemism, however, gives way to a higher 
form of religion, whenever a people advances 
to anything like a settled form of society. 
This second stage of religion, among all the 
great nations of antiquity, except the Jewish, 
whose religious development is unique, con- 
sists in the worship of the divine as mani- 
fested in those universal powers of nature — 
the heavens, the sun, the winds, etc. — 
which exercise so large an influence upon 
the natural life of man, while yet they are 
altogether beyond the control of his will. 
Now it is easy to see how a people, who 



CONNEXION OF MORALITY AND RELIGION 17 

embodied their religious ideal in these great 
natural powers, should also have a higher 
moral ideal than races which never got beyond 
the stage of totemism. Early man found in 
his totem something higher than himself, but 
the divinity he ascribed to it was not so much 
in the object as in his own mind, or at least 
it was only in the object in the sense that 
nothing can exist which is not in some way 
a manifestation of the divine. But, when the 
divine is found in objects, which in force or 
splendour surpass the weak physical energy 
of man, the object selected is not altogether 
inadequate as a symbol of that spiritual power 
which man is feeling after; and as it is a 
universal object, it is not an inappropriate 
medium of the new ideal of a social unity 
embracing a number of tribes allied in blood. 
Thus the worship of the great powers of 
nature supplies a religious ideal which helps 
to unite all the members of allied tribes by 
the bond of a common faith. 

From the worship of these natural powers 
the higher races advance to the stage of what 
is ordinarily called polytheism. The transi- 



1 8 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

tion is effected by the tendency to personify 
those powers, and thus to bring them nearer 
to man. It is at this point that a highly 
significant divergence takes place, a diver- 
gence which determines the direction in which 
the subsequent development takes place. The 
Egyptian and Indian do indeed personify the 
gods, and thus for the time lift them out of 
the lower rank of mere powers of nature, 
but they do not humanise them. Hence their 
polytheism takes the form of what Mr. Max 
Muller has called henotheism. The ten- 
dency to unity, as well as multiplicity, is in 
operation from the very dawn of religion. 
Even races who have not advanced beyond 
the primitive stage of totemism always have a 
god who is regarded as higher than the other 
totems, and in nature-worship the heavens is 
naturally taken as the highest embodiment of 
the divine. The tendency to unification is 
therefore present from the first, but in the 
henotheistic phase of polytheism it assumes 
the peculiar form that each god becomes at 
the time of worship the only one who is 
present to the consciousness of the wor- 



CONNEXION OF MORALITY AND RELIGION 19 

shipper, and hence to him are attributed for 
the time being all the attributes which at 
other times are distributed among a number 
of gods. Now the importance of directing 
attention to this tendency to henotheism is 
that it explains why the Egyptian and Indian 
religions developed, not into monotheism, but 
into pantheism. The Greek religion, on the 
other hand, not only personified but human- 
ised the gods, and the clearly cut types thus 
formed became a permanent possession of 
the race. Hence, when the Greek finally 
abandoned polytheism, his religion developed 
into monotheism, not into pantheism ; and 
so long as he remained polytheistic the in- 
stinct for unity was satisfied by conceiving 
of Zeus as the Father and Ruler of the gods, 
or later as the representative of their united 
will. Now, whether polytheism assumes the 
henotheistic or the Greek form, it is obvious 
that it presents an ideal which serves to unite 
all the members of a nation by a common 
worship. Nor does it seem fanciful to say 
that polytheism is the natural form which 
the religious ideal assumes among nations 



20 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

which have been either formed into a single 
political unit by a combination of tribes allied 
in blood, or into a number of independent 
units united only by the bonds of a common 
descent and a common religion ; in any case, 
it serves as the vehicle for the religious 
ideal of peoples who cannot conceive of a 
wider bond than that of the nation, or of the 
nation as other than a political unity based 
upon the natural tie of blood. Polytheism, 
therefore, tended to perpetuate absolute dis- 
tinctions of caste, or of master and slave, 
and it naturally fostered a proud contempt 
for all who belonged to another nation, and 
therefore could not claim descent from the 
gods of their country. Here, therefore, we 
have another proof, if further proof were 
needed, of the close correspondence between 
religion and morality. 

Polytheism, as has already been indicated, 
develops either into pantheism, or into mon- 
otheism. When it is of a henotheistic type, 
as in the case of the Egyptians and Indians, 
it naturally takes the former direction ; the 
Greek religion, with its definitely characterised 









CONNEXION OF MORALITY AND RELIGION 21 

human types, as naturally follows the latter 
direction. Both the Egyptian and the Hindu 
are deficient in that poetic and artistic fac- 
ulty, which is characteristic of the Greek, 
and hence they never succeed in imparting 
freedom and spirituality to their gods. With 
the rise of reflection the tendency to unity, 
which has already shown itself in their hen- 
otheism, carries them beyond the tendency to 
multiplicity, and as their gods have not been 
conceived as endowed with intelligence and 
will, they come to conceive of the divine 
as a purely abstract being, of which nothing 
can be said but that it is. To this relig- 
ious ideal corresponds the ethical ideal. If 
the divine nature is absolutely without dis- 
tinction, man can become divine only by 
the destruction of all that constitutes his 
separate individuality. Thus pantheism leads 
to the dissolution of all fixed moral distinc- 
tions, and therefore to the denial of any 
radical distinction between good and evil. 
" Whatever is, is right." It can therefore 
look with perfect calmness upon the wildest 
aberrations of passion, and it leads in men 



22 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

of a higher type to asceticism, only because 
it regards passion as a form of that universal 
illusion, or Maya, which supposes the finite 
to be real. 

The Greek religion, as the product of a 
race of poets and artists, whose nature re- 
sponded gladly to all the divine beauty and 
order of the world and of human life, could 
not thus pass into a joyless pantheism. 
Hence, under the influence of its poets and 
philosophers, it developed into a monothe- 
ism, in which the divine was conceived as 
a single spiritual Being, endowed with in- 
telligence and will. It is significant that 
the Greeks only reached this stage, when 
their narrow civic state had already revealed 
its inadequacy, and when the bond of nation- 
ality, which had been hitherto preserved by 
loyalty to the national faith, had lost its 
power. Thus the wider conception of re- 
ligion was reflected in the virtual dissolution 
of civic and national morality. It is time, how- 
ever, to consider more carefully the strength 
and weakness of the Greek ideal of life. 
This will be done in the following chapter. 



CHAPTER II 



THE GREEK IDEAL 



Starting, like the other Indo-European 
peoples, from the worship of the great powers 
of nature, the Greeks developed a form of 
religion which is the highest type of poly- 
theism. This religion was the embodiment 
of that love of beauty, truth, and freedom, 
which is distinctive of the Greek spirit. In 
the Homeric poems, the transition from the 
worship of nature has already been made. 
The gods are not only personified, but hu- 
manised. Turning his eyes to the expanse 
of heaven, the early Greek expressed his 
consciousness of the divine in the majestic 
form of Zeus, whose nod shook the whole 
heavens and the earth. The physical splen- 
dour of the sun became for him the radi- 
ant form of Apollo, shooting down gleaming- 
arrows from his silver bow. Thus was grad- 

23 



24 THE CHRISTIAN- IDEAL OF LIFE 

ually formed, not without the addition of 
new elements and even new gods, sometimes 
borrowed from Semitic sources but invari- 
ably transmuted into higher form, the pan- 
theon of glorious shapes which filled the 
imagination of Homer. The divine nature 
is conceived as manifested in distinct types, 
each possessed of intelligence and will, and 
embodied in human forms, which exhibit the 
utmost perfection of physical beauty. These 
gracious forms only differ from man in the 
perfection of their spiritual and physical qual- 
ities, and in their freedom from decay and 
death. Thus the Greek expresses in his re- 
ligion his ideal of perfect manhood as the 
complete harmony of soul and body. Were 
it possible to secure and retain for ever physi- 
cal, intellectual, and moral beauty, the ideal 
of the early Greek would be realised. That 
ideal, however, was one which did not sepa- 
rate the good of the individual from the 
good of society. Achilles is distinguished, 
not merely by splendid physical beauty, 
powers, and eloquence, but by his burning 
indignation against wrong : and, when 



THE GREEK IDEAL 2 $ 

carries his resentment against Agamemnon to 
an extreme which threatens the destruction 
of the whole Greek host, he is punished by 
an untimely death. So Zeus is the imper- 
sonation of a wise and just ruler, Apollo 
the divine type of the poetic and religious 
mind, Athena the ideal of valour directed 
and kept in check by wise self-restraint. 
The Greek gods are thus the expression of 
the Greek ideal of a society in which the 
highest natural qualities are valued as a 
means to the realisation of a free community. 
The Homeric king is not a despot, but the 
guardian of the sacred customs on which 
the rights of his subjects are based. He 
does nothing without consulting his council 
of elders, and the public assembly consists 
of the whole body of citizens. The world of 
the gods is an idealised counterpart of the 
heroic form of society ; and, in fact, the 
early Greek could only conceive of the di- 
vine as a community of gods, living in each 
others society, and sympathising with the 
fortunes of men. 

The Homeric gods are thus the embodi- 



26 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

ment of that free and joyous existence which 
was the ideal of life of the early Greek. The 
Greek religion is essentially a religion of 
this world ; for, though the Greek believed in a 
shadowy realm of the dead, his heart was set 
upon the beauty, the joy, the sunlight of this 
world, and he looked forward to the future life, 
without dread, indeed, but with a melancholy 
resignation. With his intrepid intellect he 
had a clear and sober apprehension of the 
shortness of life and the limitations of hu- 
manity, but he had not yet lost the fresh 
exuberance of the youth of the world; and 
in devotion to his country and faith in divine 
justice, he found all that was needed to satisfy 
his highest desires. Entirely free from a 
slavish dread of the gods, he came into their 
presence with joyous confidence. He did not 
forget that his destiny lay on the knees of the 
gods, but, having perfect faith in their justice, 
he did not prostrate himself before them with 
the abject submission of the Asiatic. 

The charm of this conception of life has 
never failed to exercise a peculiar fascination, 
and indeed it contains elements which must 



THE GREEK IDEAL 27 

be embodied in the modern ideal, though these 
must be transmuted into a higher form. Its 
fundamental defect is that it can be approxi- 
mately realised only by those who possess 
exceptional gifts of nature and fortune, and 
that it conceives of the highest life as simply 
the expansion of the natural life. The Greek 
was destitute of that profound consciousness 
of the Infinite which was characteristic of the 
Jewish religion, and therefore of the wide 
interval between man as he is and as he ought 
to be. No doubt in his deepest nature man 
is identical with God, but his deepest nature 
reveals itself only when he turns against his 
immediate self. Of this truth the Greek had 
no proper apprehension, and therefore he 
never got beyond the ideal of a perfect natural 
life, in which the spiritual and natural were 
in harmony with each other, and of a State 
in which the individual citizen found his com- 
plete satisfaction in devotion to the common 
weal. That this limited ideal could not be 
permanently satisfactory is shown by the grad- 
ual emergence of a deeper conception of life, 
which as time went on came more and more 



28 



THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 



into the foreground, until it finally led, in the 
poets and philosophers, to a complete trans- 
formation of the earlier belief. 

Though the Greek religion is the highest 
form of polytheism, it has, like all polytheistic 
religions, the fundamental defect of having 
no adequate idea of the unity and spirituality 
of the divine nature. This defect is, in the 
Greek form of polytheism, made all the more 
prominent by the individuality ascribed to the 
gods. The gods, as embodied in sensible 
human form, are limited in' space and time, 
and hence their relation to man is inadequately 
conceived. There can be no proper compre- 
hension of the unity and spirituality of the 
divine nature, so long as the divine is con- 
ceived as merely the perfection of the natural. 
Beings who are regarded as limited in space 
and time cannot be the source of all reality, 
and their relation to man can only be external. 
Hence the Greek gods themselves were con- 
ceived as having come into existence at a 
definite time, and their action upon men was 
represented as their actual sensible appearance 
to their favourites. Athena presents herself 



, 



THE GREEK IDEAL 29 



in human shape to Achilles, and persuades 
him to abandon his purpose of slaying Aga- 
memnon; Aphrodite hides Paris in a cloud 
when he flees from the spear of Menelaus. 
Thus the life of man is represented as directly 
interfered with by the gods, so that man seems 
to be merely a puppet in their hands. This 
defect is inseparable from the pictorial form 
of the religion, which necessarily represents 
the spiritual as on the same plane with the 
natural. 

Even in Homer, however, there are ele- 
ments which show that the Greek religion 
must ultimately accomplish its own euthana- 
sia. There was in it from the first a latent 
contradiction which could not fail to mani- 
fest itself openly at a later time. The very 
concreteness and humanity of the gods was 
at variance with the instinct for unity, which 
could neither be suppressed nor reconciled 
with the polytheistic basis of the traditional 
faith. To a certain extent that instinct was 
satisfied by the conception of Zeus as the 
" Father of gods and men," whose authority, 
though it is not absolute, is higher than that 



30 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

of the other gods. But this conception could 
only be temporarily satisfactory ; and, indeed, 
even in Homer, there is already indicated a 
deeper sort of unity, which is inconsistent 
with this mere unity of the pictorial imagina- 
tion. For Homer, like his successors, was 
strongly impressed with the belief that the 
life of man is subject to divine control, and 
that his destiny is determined in accordance 
with absolute principles of justice. Paris 
violates the sacred bond which united host 
and guest, and punishment falls upon him- 
self and all his kindred. The Trojans break 
the oath to which they had solemnly sworn, 
and draw down upon themselves the punish- 
ment which they deserved. There was thus 
an absolute faith in the righteous judgments 
of the gods. Such a faith could not be 
reconciled with the caprice, partiality, and 
lawlessness, which were ascribed to the gods 
in their individual character. For they are 
represented as not only violating accepted 
moral laws, but as at variance with one an- 
other, and guilty of gross favouritism. This 
unreconciled antagonism was partly due to 



THE GREEK WEAL 3 1 

the survival of earlier and less elevated ideas 
of the divine nature, to which custom and 
tradition lent an adventitious sanctity, but it 
was also inseparable from the anthropomor- 
phism of the Greek religion. The conflict 
of competing ideas is especially apparent in 
the conception of Zeus, whose character as 
an individual is widely different from what 
has been called his official character as the 
exponent of the common will of the gods. 
Sometimes Homer speaks of Zeus as reward- 
ing or punishing men ; sometimes this power 
is vested in the gods as a whole. In the 
Iliad Zeus is called the guardian of oaths, 
while yet Agamemnon speaks of the suffer- 
ings inflicted by " the gods " upon those who 
swear falsely. In the Odyssey there are even 
passages in which an abrupt transition is 
made from the gods to Zeus, as when Telema- 
chus invokes the gods, " If perchance Zeus 
will punish the wickedness of the suitors 
(I- 378)." This tendency to conceive of Zeus 
as the sole administrator of justice, which 
is manifest even in the Homeric poems, 
becomes more and more pronounced, so that 



32 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

in the period between Homer and the Per- 
sian wars, it is almost invariably Zeus who 
is spoken of as the guardian of moral order. 
Thus, without any explicit rejection of poly- 
theism, there was a continual tendency to 
transcend it. Isocrates, who is the spokes- 
man, not of philosophers like Anaxagoras, 
but of the educated common sense of his 
time, explains the poetic representation of 
Zeus as king of the gods by the natural 
tendency to figure the divine government 
after the fashion of an earthly state. Besides 
this explicit criticism of the popular faith, 
the striving after a higher idea of the divine 
is shown in the reverential feeling which 
led the worshipper, in calling upon one of 
the gods to add, " or by whatever name thou 
mayst desire to be called." But nothing 
shows more clearly the tendency to go be- 
yond the earlier mode of thought than the 
indefinite terms by which the divine power 
is designated by the prose writers. They 
still, no doubt, speak of " the gods," but they 
usually employ such expressions as " the 
divine," "the god," " the daemonic," when they 



THE GREEK IDEAL 33 

have to speak of the moral government of 
the world. 

There is thus in the development of Greek 
thought a clearly marked tendency to unity, 
manifesting itself, on the one hand, in the 
conception of Zeus as the exponent of the 
common will of the gods ; and, on the other 
hand, in the conception of "something divine," 
which was not definitely embodied in the 
gods of the popular faith. It has been held 
that the Greek conception of a " fate," to 
which the gods as well as men are subject, 
indicates a certain pantheistic tendency in 
the Greek mind, which was only kept in 
check by the opposite tendency to conceive 
of the divine as personal. This view seems 
to imply that every attempt to transcend 
particularism and anthropomorphism indicates 
a movement towards pantheism. It seems 
more natural to say that the movement be- 
yond polytheism may be either towards pan- 
theism or monotheism, and that the special 
direction which the movement takes will be 
determined by the peculiar form of the poly- 
theism which forms the starting-point. In 



34 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

the Greek mind, which humanised the gods, 
the reaction against particularism was nat- 
urally towards monotheism. The idea of 
"fate" was therefore conceived, not as a mere 
external necessity, but as a rational law, and 
the gods were regarded as subject to it only 
in the sense that even the divine nature was 
not beyond law. 

The more firmly the conception of a moral 
government of the world was grasped, the 
clearer was the apprehension of the apparent 
exceptions to it. In Homer and Hesiod, faith 
in divine justice assumes the simple form of 
a belief that the pious man is directly re- 
warded by a happy and fortunate life. In the 
Odyssey Ulysses says, that when a king is 
pious and just, the land is fruitful and the 
people prosperous. Hesiod declares that on 
the just man, who keeps his oath, Zeus be- 
stows more renown and a fairer posterity than 
on the unjust. It was a popular belief that 
impiety never fails to be punished by blind- 
ness, madness, or death. To the objection 
that the innocent were sometimes unfortunate, 
it was answered that they were involved in 



i 



THE GREEK IDEAL 35 

the misfortunes of the wicked. The similar 
difficulty that the wicked are often prosperous 
was met by saying that divine justice, though 
it may be delayed, always overtakes them in 
the end. The same idea is expressed in the 
well-known saying of an unknown poet, that 
" the mills of the gods grind slow but very 
small." A further modification of the idea 
of divine retribution was that, though the 
wicked man may himself escape, misfortune is 
sure to fall upon his posterity. We also find 
among the Greeks a growing scepticism of 
the reality of divine justice, but the best 
minds surmounted this scepticism by a deeper 
view of the relation between the divine and 
human, — a view which was most fully devel- 
oped by ^Eschylus and Sophocles. In these 
poets, in fact, the current religious and moral 
ideas were so deepened as to result in an 
ethical monotheism, though they never con- 
sciously surrendered the polytheism of the 
popular faith. 

^Eschylus, the poet of the men who fought 
at Marathon and Salamis, has unbounded faith 
in the gods of his country. At the same time 









36 THE CHRTST1AX IDEAL OF LIFE 

his plastic imagination works freely on the 
mass of legendary material which he found 
ready to his hand, and into the old bottles 
he pours the new wine of a higher conception 
of the divine nature and the destiny of man. 
This transforming process is exhibited in his 
reconstruction of the myth of Prometheus. 
Zeus, the representative of intelligence and 
order, when he has dethroned Chronos, finds 
on the earth the miserable race of men. Their 
champion, the Titan Prometheus, steals " the 
flashing fire, mother of all arts," and conveys 
it to men in a hollow reed. For his insolence 
and deceit he must undergo proportional pun- 
ishment, until he has repented and submitted 
to the sovereign will of Zeus. Suffering but 
intensifies his proud and rebellious spirit, and 
it is only after long ages of punishment, and 
through the influence of Heracles, the god- 
like man, whose life has been spent in toil for 
others, that he is at last induced to give up 
his purpose of revenge. There seems little 
doubt that here, as elsewhere, /Eschylus seeks 
to show that the world is governed with abso- 
lute justice, and that the true lesson of life is 






THE GREEK IDEAL 37 

to submit to the divine will. When man sets 
up his own rebellious will against the Ruler 
of the universe, he must expect divine pun- 
ishment. The triple Fates and the mindful 
Erinyes jealously guard the sanctity of the 
primal ties. The doom of Troy is the divine 
punishment for violated hospitality. Aga- 
memnon perishes because his hands are 
stained with his daughter's blood. ^Eschy- 
lus explicitly rejects the old doctrine of the 
envy of the gods : it is sinful rebellion against 
the divine law which brings punishment in 
its train. The sins of the fathers are no doubt 
visited upon the children, but the curse never 
falls upon those whose hands are pure. The 
house of Atreus seems the prey of a malign, 
inevitable fate, but only because in each new 
representative there is a frenzy of wickedness, 
an infatuate hardening of the heart. When, 
therefore, a pure scion of this accursed stock 
appears, the curse is removed: he suffers in- 
deed, but his end is peace ; and at last he 
returns in honour to reign over the house 
which he has cleansed. Thus the Erinyes 
become the Eumenides: the stern law of jus- 



38 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

tice turns at last a gracious face to those who 
fear and honour the gods. 

But, while ^Eschylus conceives of Zeus as 
the divine representative of the whole order 
of society, the divine law is still conceived by 
him as an external law to which man must 
submit. Sophocles, on the other hand, while 
he endorses the conception of a divine law of 
justice, seeks to show that this law operates 
in man as the law of his own reason. CEdipus 
unwittingly violates the sacred bond of the 
family, and punishment inevitably follows; but 
his punishment is also the recoil upon himself 
of his defiant self-assertion, and therefore, when 
he recognises that his suffering was not un- 
merited, he is at last reconciled to the divine 
will and comes to harmony with himself. Yet 
even in Sophocles the limitation of the Greek 
ideal of life is manifest; for, though he views 
suffering as a means of purification from self- 
assertion and overweening pride, he does not 
reach the conception that in self-sacrifice the 
true nature of man is revealed; the highest 
point to which he attains is the conception 
that man can reach happiness only by vol- 



THE GREEK IDEAL 39 

untary submission to the divine will, which 
is also the law of his own reason. It is only 
in Euripides that we find something like an 
anticipation of the Christian idea that self- 
realisation is attained through self-sacrifice. 
In Euripides, however, this result is reached 
by a surrender of his faith in the divine justice. 
Man, he seems to say, is capable of heroic 
self-sacrifice at the prompting of natural affec- 
tion, but this is the law of human nature, not 
of the divine nature. Thus in him morality is 
divorced from religion, and therefore there is 
over all his work the sadness which inevitably 
follows from a sceptical distrust of the exist- 
ence of any objective principle of goodness. 
This division of religion and morality could 
not be final, and hence the attempts of Plato 
and Aristotle to restore the broken harmony 
by a higher conception of the divine nature. 
Though the transformation of the Greek 
religion by the great poets of Greece was a 
continuous movement towards a more spiritual 
view of the divine nature, it did not involve 
an explicit breach with polytheism, except 
in the case of Euripides. yEschylus and 



40 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

Sophocles, though they virtually affirm the 
unity and spirituality of the divine will, are 
not in conscious antagonism to the popular 
faith. Such an antagonism was, however, in- 
evitable, so soon as philosophical reflection 
arose, and proceeded to ask how far mythology 
could be accepted as historical truth. The 
question could not be raised without pro- 
ducing a temporary scepticism. The first 
philosophers were therefore almost entirely 
negative in their attitude towards the tradi- 
tional faith.* It was only with Socrates and 
his followers that a perception of the rational 
element implied in mythology was appre- 
hended. Hence, while Plato is severe in his 
condemnation of the unworthy representa- 
tions of the divine nature in Homer and 
Hesiod, he recognises that the imaginative 
form which that faith assumed was a neces- 
sary stage in the education of the race and 
of the individual. Poetry is a "lie," no 
doubt, but it is a " noble lie." Plato is 
here seeking to separate the form from the 

* "Whether there are gods or not I cannot tell," said Protagoras; 
" life is too short for such obscure problems." 



THE GREEK WEAL 



41 



matter, the spirit from the earthly tabernacle 
in which it is enclosed. The divine, as he 
contends, is not immoral, malicious, or de- 
ceitful. What he is really seeking to show is 
that the divine nature transcends the sensible, 
and is the ultimate source of all truth, beauty, 
and goodness. Plato does not, in the first 
instance, reject the pictorial representations 
of the popular imagination, which he no doubt 
regarded as inseparable from the poetic garb 
endeared to the Greek heart by the hallowing 
associations of ages ; but he insists that the 
gods must not be portrayed as violating the 
sanctities of moral law, as inflicting evil upon 
man from envy, or as appearing in lower 
forms. The gods are absolutely good, truth- 
ful, and beautiful, and therefore are eternally 
and unchangeably the same. It is obvious, 
however, that Plato does not at bottom believe 
that the divine nature can be represented in 
sensible form at all, and hence we cannot be 
surprised that, with his imperfect theory of 
art as an " imitation " of sensible reality, the 
more he reflects upon the distorting influence 
of all imaginative representations of the divine 



42 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF UFE 

nature, the more dissatisfied he becomes, until 
at last he concludes, though with great re- 
luctance, that there is no place for the poet 
in that ideal city of which he dreamed such 
beautiful, philosophical dreams. The prepara- 
tion for this extreme view is already made 
in the contention that poetry is a " lie/' even 
if it is a " noble lie," and in the denial that 
evil can in any sense proceed from God, or 
that the divine can ever be manifested except 
in its own absolutely perfect form. For the 
representation of what is false, though it may 
be necessary as an educational device, has no 
ultimate justification ; the Manichean separa- 
tion of evil from the divine is at the same time 
the exclusion of God from the actual world; 
and the only perfect form of the divine must 
be the supersensible. Thus, by the natural 
development of Greek thought, Plato is at 
last led to maintain a spiritual monotheism, re- 
sembling in its main features the conception 
of God, which by an independent path was 
reached by the Hebrew people in the later 
stages of their history. In his revolt from 
the pictorial representations of the divine, he 






THE GREEK IDEAL 43 

is led to conceive of God as dwelling in a 
transcendent region beyond the actual world, 
and this, though a necessary step in the 
evolution of the religious consciousness, is 
not the last word of religion. The Infinite 
cannot be severed from the finite, God from 
man, without becoming itself finite, unless we 
are prepared to regard the finite as pure illu- 
sion. Nor does Aristotle, though he protests 
against the Platonic separation of the real 
and the ideal, succeed in avoiding the rock 
on which Plato's philosophy of religion makes 
shipwreck; for he too conceives of God as a 
purely contemplative being, alone with Him- 
self, and self-sufficient in His isolation, who 
acts upon the world only as the sculptor hews 
and shapes the block of marble, which can 
never be quite divested of its material gross- 
ness. 

If this is at all a fair account of the the- 
ology of Plato and Aristotle, we must admit 
that their solutions are not final. The nega- 
tive movement by which the creations of art 
and the products of the religious conscious- 
ness in its imaginative form have been re- 



44 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

jected, and the first unquestioning faith in 
the outward manifestation of reason in nature 
and human life " sicklied o'er with the pale 
cast of thought," is only imperfectly supple- 
mented by a positive movement in which 
the real is virtually declared to lie beyond 
the actual. For, so long as the world of 
our experience is regarded as containing an 
irrational element, the human spirit must 
either fall back baffled upon the phenomenal, 
or seek to fly beyond the " flaming walls of 
the world " by some other organ than reason. 
It is, therefore, not surprising that Plato 
and Aristotle were succeeded, on the one 
hand by the individualistic philosophies of 
the Stoics, Epicureans, and Sceptics, and on 
the other hand by the Neo-platonists and 
Gnostics, who in despair of reason took ref- 
uge in a supposed " immediate intuition " or 
" ecstasy." 



CHAPTER III 

THE JEWISH IDEAL 

The religion of Greece, as we have seen, 
developed from a humanistic polytheism, 
through the influence of its great poets and 
philosophers, into monotheism. Even in its 
polytheistic stage there was a marked ten- 
dency towards unity, but this tendency was 
not realised until Plato affirmed the unity 
and spirituality of the divine nature. The 
religion of Israel reached the same point by 
a more direct path. There seems to be 
clear evidence that Israel had passed from 
a primitive totemism to the worship of 
great powers of nature before the captivity 
in Egypt. Evidence of the former stage is 
to be found in the household gods or tera- 
phim, and of the latter in the early concep- 
tion of Jehovah as the God of the tempest, 
who had His seat on Mount Sinai. What is 

45 



46 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

unique in the development of the religion 
of Israel is that it passed without a break 
from the worship of nature, to the worship 
of Jehovah, without going through the in- 
termediate stage of polytheism. This pecul- 
iarity arose from the whole character and 
history of the people. Unlike the Greeks, 
the people of Israel had no artistic faculty, 
and what moved them in nature was not 
the beauty of the world, but the tremendous 
energy manifested in its more terrible aspects. 
The divine power they saw manifested in the 
thunder, and in the tempest which broke on 
the mountains of Sinai and rolled across the 
desert. This great and terrible Lord was, 
from the time of their deliverance from ser- 
vitude in Egypt under their great leader 
Moses, the common object of worship of 
all the tribes. Thus even before their politi- 
cal union, the belief in Jehovah was the bond 
which kept them united as a people, and 
after the loss of their national independence 
it kept them separate and distinct from all 
other nations. It is true that, after their 
settlement in Canaan, there was a continual 






THE JEWISH IDEAL 47 

struggle between those who worshipped only 
Jehovah and those who saw no harm in com- 
bining His worship with that of other gods; 
but the great name of Jehovah never failed 
to reunite all the tribes in their struggle for 
independence, and so to prevent them from 
being merged in the surrounding tide of 
Canaanite life. And when the monarchy was 
founded, and the religion of Jehovah became 
the national religion, the intense conscious- 
ness of their great past and the anticipation 
of a still greater future made it impossible 
that their faith in Jehovah should ever be 
completely lost. 

Up to the time of the great prophets, Jeho- 
vah was conceived only as the greatest of 
all gods, the God of Israel, who went before 
them in battle and led them to victory, and 
who was pledged to aid His people in their 
time of need. Thus the religious faith of 
Israel was bound up with a belief in the 
permanence of its nationality. It was the 
work of the great prophets to free the con- 
ception of Jehovah from its exclusively na- 
tional character. In effecting this change, 



48 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

they were but developing what was implicit 
in the conception from the first. He who 
was at first conceived to be manifested in the 
great and terrible aspects of nature came to 
be regarded as raised entirely above nature, 
and the God of battles was transformed into 
the God of holiness. Hence, though Jeho- 
vah is still conceived as standing in a more 
intimate relation to Israel than to other na- 
tions, it is maintained that this relation can 
continue only if Israel is pre-eminent in 
righteousness. " You only have I known of 
all the families of the earth, therefore I will 
punish you for all your iniquities." Israel 
must no longer regard herself as secure of 
the divine favour, irrespective of her conduct: 
if she continues to dishonour Jehovah, her 
nationality will be destroyed. This is the 
idea which Isaiah insists upon with such 
fervour and power. Even when the king- 
doms of Judah and Israel were in the full 
tide of prosperity, the prophet discovered in 
them the seeds of decay. The upper class 
was materialised, and the lower class full of 
superstition and practical unbelief. The re- 



THE JEWISH IDEAL 49 

suit was inevitable : their cities will be wasted 
and the land left desolate, though, as the 
prophet believes, there will always be a rem- 
nant to form the nucleus of a new and re- 
generate nation. Jehovah will employ the 
great heathen powers as an' instrument for 
the punishment of Israel. A people who 
fail in the practice of justice and mercy 
cannot hope for the favour of a righteous 
and holy God. 

It is obvious that in this new conception 
the old idea of Jehovah as the God only of 
Israel has been virtually transcended. Ac- 
cordingly the prophets deny that there is any 
God but Jehovah, and, therefore, declare that 
He has relations to other nations as well as 
to Israel. He governs the world, not in the 
interests of one nation only, but in the in- 
terests of righteousness. He is the Creator 
of all things, and the Ruler of the universe, 
though He has specially revealed Himself to 
Israel. 

In the later prophets a further advance is 
made. Jehovah is not only the God of na- 
tions, but He is directly related to the indi- 



50 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

vidual soul. This advance followed as a 
natural consequence of the conception of 
God as a God of righteousness. A God who 
is beyond nature, and is essentially spiritual, 
cannot be permanently conceived as related 
only to the nation. Holiness depends upon 
the inner state of the soul, and therefore the 
relation of man to God is a personal one. 
Hence Jeremiah and Ezekiel assert personal 
responsibility. " Every one shall die for his 
own iniquity/' says Jeremiah ; and Ezekiel 
declares that " the soul that sinneth, it shall 
die." 

With the conception of God as absolutely 
holy, and the demand for perfect purity of 
heart and conduct, there arose the conscious- 
ness of the opposition between the finite and 
the infinite, the actual and the ideal. Thus 
the religion of Israel, unlike the Greek, is a 
religion of prophecy. The prophet, main- 
taining that man was originally made "a little 
lower than God," and contrasting with this 
perfect relation his present sinfulness, looks 
forward to a time when the unity with God 
which has been lost shall be restored. 



THE JEWISH IDEAL 5 1 

The higher conception of religion and mo- 
rality taught by the prophets was not imme- 
diately accepted by the people, though the 
successive reforms narrated in the histories 
show that it had commended itself to the 
best minds. It was only with the exile that 
the people obtained a firm grasp of the idea 
that they were the custodians of the one 
true religion. This conviction finds its most 
perfect expression in the second Isaiah, who 
declares that the peculiar mission of Israel is 
to make known the true God to the heathen. 
There will always be a faithful " remnant " 
entirely devoted to the service of Jehovah, 
who, even if they suffer for the sins of others, 
will be the means of leading many to right- 
eousness. 

With the cessation of the fresh spring of 
prophetic utterance, the Jewish conception of 
God tended to become more and more ab- 
stract. The way was prepared for this change 
by the formation, under Ezra and Nehemiah, 
of a sort of theocratic commonwealth, a com- 
pact and homogeneous little state, devoted 
mainly to the worship of Jehovah. With the 



$2 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

establishment of this community, the separa- 
tion of Israel from the rest of the world, 
and the subsequent worship of the letter of 
scripture, were inevitable. Jerusalem became 
the universally acknowledged centre of the 
religion and worship of Jehovah, to which 
from time to time Israelites from all parts 
of the earth flocked to offer sacrifice in the 
temple. Though this centralisation of sacri- 
ficial worship was a bond of union to the 
despised race, it was not effective as a na- 
tional bond, while on the other hand it was 
hostile to the wider bond of humanity. Indi- 
rectly, the centralisation of worship in Jeru- 
salem gave rise to the institution of the 
synagogue. This change had important con- 
sequences. Religion became no longer merely 
national, but individual. The most beauti- 
ful flower of this personal religion was its 
sacred lyrical poetry. Many of the psalms, 
most of which are admitted to belong to the 
centuries after the exile, express the pure and 
pious feeling called forth by the reading of 
the Law and the prophets in the synagogue. 
There was, however, another consequence of 



THE JEWISH IDEAL 53 

the change. The importance of the sacer- 
dotal cultus in Jerusalem receded into the 
background. The Levite became of less con- 
sequence than the Rabbi skilled in the Law. 
Thus the Law came to be the centre of all 
the thoughts of the pious Israelite. The 
whole education of the people, in the family, 
the school, and the synagogue, was intended 
to make them a "people of the law." No 
longer did Jehovah reveal His will through 
the direct inspiration of a prophet. A final 
revelation of Himself had been given in the 
Law, and the sole duty of His people was to 
find out by a careful examination of the words 
of Scripture what had been revealed once 
for all. Shut out from the direct conscious- 
ness of God, the conception of His nature 
became more and more abstract. He was 
"the Holy One," the "Absolute," raised to 
an infinite distance above the world and man, 
even to name whom was profane. Religion 
thus came to be regarded, not as the com- 
munion of man with God, but as the right 
relation of man before God. The Law took 
the place formerly occupied by God. It is 



54 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

identified with the eternal wisdom, which 
arose from the unknown depths of the divine 
nature ; it is the image or daughter of God, 
which was before the creation of the world, 
and in the contemplation of which the divine 
life is passed. As expressing the whole nature 
of God, the Law is the ultimate revelation, 
valid for all time and even for eternity ; it is 
the true food of the soul, the tree of life, the 
source of all knowledge. The essence of re- 
ligion, therefore, consists in love of the Law, 
as exhibited in its study and in observance of 
its precepts. Thus the Law at once unites 
Israel to Jehovah, and separates her from 
the whole heathen world, which by its rejec- 
tion of the Law at Sinai adopted a hostile 
attitude toward Jehovah. 

As conformity to the Law was the standard 
and source of all righteousness, God was 
bound by the terms of the covenant entered 
into with Israel to recompense the pious 
Israelite in proportion to his observance of 
its precepts. As this proportion was not 
always observed, it was held that at some 
future time the balance would be restored. 






THE JEWISH IDEAL 55 

The whole religious life thus revolved around 
these two poles, — conformity to the Law and 
the hope of future reward. Under such a 
purely external conception, religion and mo- 
rality were emptied of life. For that free 
and spontaneous devotion to goodness which 
is of the very essence of the spiritual life, was 
substituted the mechanical observance of rules 
imposed by external authority. The Law was 
to be obeyed, not because it expressed the 
true nature of man, but because it had been 
ordained by Him who had power to reward 
and punish. As its various precepts were 
not seen to flow from any principle, the 
moral life was conceived to consist in strict 
obedience to every detail of the Law. Where 
all was equally imposed by God, every require- 
ment of the Law had the same absolute claim 
to obedience. Thus there was, in St. Pauls 
phrase, " a zeal for God, but not according to 
knowledge." To the conscientious Israelite, 
life was made an intolerable burden, while the 
rigid adherent of the Law could hardly escape 
from a proud and boastful self-righteousness. 
The logical consequences of this legalistic 



56 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

religion and morality are most clearly seen 
in the life and theory of the Pharisees, who 
carried out to its extreme the spirit which 
rules the whole post-exilic period. It has 
sometimes been said that the Pharisees were 
the patriotic party, as contrasted with the Sad- 
ducees, who were always ready to sacrifice their 
country and even the national religion from 
motives of worldly prudence. It would seem, 
however, that the main spring of action in the 
Pharisees was not love of country, but love of 
the Law. And by the Law they meant, not 
so much the written as the " oral " law, which 
had been gradually formed by the labours of 
the scribes. " The Pharisees/' says Josephus, 
" have imposed upon the people many laws 
taken from the tradition of the fathers, which 
are not written in the Law of Moses." Such 
an extension of the Law was inevitable. A law 
accepted upon authority necessarily gives rise 
to casuistry, the moment an attempt is made 
to make it a complete guide of life; and the 
precedents thus established naturally come to 
be regarded as an unfolding of what is already 
contained in the law. What distinguished 



THE JEWISH IDEAL 57 

the Pharisees was their claim to peculiar 
strictness in the interpretation and observance 
of the Law, or rather of the " traditions of the 
fathers," and especially of the laws relating to 
cleanness and uncleanness. They regarded 
themselves as the true Israel, in distinction 
not only from the heathen, but from the less 
scrupulous of their own countrymen. That ex- 
cessive zeal for the letter of the Law was their 
ruling motive seems to be proved by their 
attitude to successive dynasties. During the 
Maccabean conflict, they adopted the popular 
cause; but when the insurrection proved suc- 
cessful, and the Asmoneans showed indiffer- 
ence to the Law, the Pharisees turned against 
them. Their zeal for the Law won the people 
to their side, and henceforth they completely 
ruled the public life. Even the direction of 
public worship was in the hands of the Phari- 
sees, though the priestly Sadducees were 
nominally the head of the Sanhedrim. The 
Sadducees were the wealthy, aristocratic party, 
and therefore belonged mainly to the priest- 
hood, which, as far back as the Persian period, 
governed the Jewish state and formed its 



58 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

nobility. They differed from the Pharisees 
in acknowledging only the Pentateuch and 
the prophets as binding, to the exclusion of 
the whole mass of legal decisions which had 
been established by the Pharisaic scribes. 
The Sadducees held fast by the older faith, 
mainly because they were averse to the big- 
otry and exclusiveness of the Pharisees. As 
a matter of fact their position as men of 
affairs, and their contact with foreign culture, 
had made them comparatively indifferent to 
the religion of their fathers. 

The Messianic hopes of the Pharisees 
were the natural complement of their legal- 
ism. They believed that, in terms of the 
covenant made at Sinai, God was bound to 
reward those who obeyed the Law, and there- 
fore that the political and individual evils to 
which the saints were subjected could only 
be temporary. They therefore looked for- 
ward to a time when the whole world would 
be united under the sceptre of Israel into a 
universal monarchy, over which the Messiah 
should be ruler and judge. In this glorious 
era, the pious individual would also be re- 



THE JEWISH IDEAL 59 

warded. The general belief was in a "res- 
urrection of the just," though some also 
expected a general resurrection, when the 
wicked should be punished and the right- 
eous rewarded. The reign of the saints was 
to be ushered in by the direct intervention 
of God, when the rule of Satan and his 
angels should give place to the rule of God 
and His anointed. The Messiah, the King 
of Israel, chosen by God from all eternity, 
should come down from heaven, where He 
was already in communion with God, and 
establish upon earth the reign of righteous- 
ness and peace. While this was the form 
which the Messianic hope assumed in the 
minds of the scribes and Pharisees, there 
were not wanting men of a finer type, in 
whose minds it was accompanied by the ex- 
pectation of the triumph of good over evil, 
and of the deliverance of man from the evil 
of his own heart. A consideration of the atti- 
tude of Jesus toward the Law and the Mes- 
sianic hopes of his time will help to bring 
out the distinctive features of the Christian, 
as distinguished from the Jewish, ideal of life. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 

The first step toward the overthrow of 
the whole set of legalistic ideas, character- 
istic of later Judaism, was taken by John 
the Baptist. It is true that the Baptist did 
not break with the legal piety of his time, 
but his watchword, " Repent, for the king- 
dom of heaven is at hand," was in essence 
a denial of the principle upon which legal- 
ism rested. For, according to that principle, 
the delay of the kingdom of heaven was not 
due to the unrighteousness of Israel, but to 
the inscrutable designs of providence, which 
permitted Satan with his host of angels to 
afflict the saints and deprive them of the 
reward to which their diligent observance 
of the Law entitled them. The reign of the 
saints could only come with the miraculous 

advent of the Messiah. The Baptist, on the 

60 



THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 6 1 

other hand, found the explanation of the 
delay in the manifestation of the kingdom 
of heaven in the sinfulness of men, not in 
the inscrutable designs of God. Hence he 
called for repentance, and, by demanding 
from every one a confession of sin, he vir- 
tually denied that the Pharisees were justi- 
fied in regarding themselves as righteous. 
The evils from which men suffered were 
not due to the malevolence of evil spirits, 
but to their own corrupt hearts. No doubt 
the blessings of the kingdom of heaven 
could only come from above, but only those 
need hope to participate in them who were 
conscious of the evil of their own hearts, and 
sought the righteousness of God. The king- 
dom of heaven was at hand, and the neces- 
sary preparation for it was a "change of 
mind." 

The effect of this message upon the Phari- 
sees could only be to arouse their indigna- 
tion and rancour; for, in demanding from 
all a confession of sin and a change of heart, 
the Baptist struck a powerful blow at their 
self-righteousness and spiritual pride ; and, 



62 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

in virtually affirming that righteousness did 
not consist in the scrupulous observance of 
the Law, he denied the very foundation upon 
which they based their expectation of future 
reward. To those finer spirits, on the other 
hand, who were painfully conscious of their 
own weakness and sinfulness, the preaching 
of the Baptist came as a welcome solution 
of their spiritual perplexities, and helped to 
restore their faith in the justice of God. 

Among those who at once discerned the 
significance of the Baptist's summons to 
repentance was Jesus, who submitted to bap- 
tism, as a sign of his belief in the funda- 
mental truth of John's doctrine, and, indeed, 
in the beginning of his ministry, adopted as 
his own the watchword, " Repent, for the 
kingdom of heaven is at hand." But, while 
Jesus thus endorsed the new way of right- 
eousness, it soon became evident that he 
gave to it another and a deeper meaning. 
In the Beatitudes this new point of view is 
already indicated. Repentance is by the Bap- 
tist conceived as the moral preparation for a 
deliverance from evil which is still future; 






THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 63 

by Jesus it is regarded as consisting in a 
personal consciousness of the infinite love of 
God. Thus the moral revolution is insepar- 
able from the religious. The kingdom of i 
heaven is already present in the souls of 
those who have an absolute faith in the 
goodness of God, a faith which finds expres- 
sion in unselfish devotion to their fellow-men, 
and which rejoices in revilings and persecu- 
tions as the process through which goodness 
gradually overcomes evil. 

The ideal of life which is indicated in the 
Beatitudes was an entire reversal of the cur- 
rent conception, especially as it had been 
formulated in the teaching of the scribes 
and Pharisees. Even the method of exposi- 
tion was new; for, whereas the accepted 
teachers in all cases sought to deduce con- 
clusions from the letter of scripture, by a 
laborious and ingenious system of exegesis, 
Jesus threw out his ideas in the form of 
aphorisms, which shone by their own light. 
And if his method was thus free and un- 
conventional, how much more revolutionary 
seemed to be the substance of his teaching! 



\ 



64 THE CHRISTIAN' IDEAL OF LIFE 

Ignoring the authority of the Law and the 
prophets, he seemed to assert an independent 
basis for the new truth which he proclaimed, 
and, in making righteousness consist entirely 
in a spiritual regeneration, he apparently 
despised the whole body of truth which 
had been revealed by God himself to Moses 
and the prophets. It was, therefore, charged 
against him that, in abrogating the Law, he 
was destroying the very foundation of relig- 
ion and morality. The objection is one 
which never fails to be made when the princi- 
pie of external authority is attacked. When 
Socrates sought to trace back the customary 
religious and moral ideas of his time to their 
principle, he was accused of denying the gods 
of his country, and corrupting the minds of 
the youth ; and the similar charge was brought 
against St. Paul, that in destroying the au- 
thority of the Law, he was virtually the 
advocate of licentiousness and impiety. The 
answer of Jesus was, that so far from abro- 
gating the Mosaic law he "fulfilled" it; z>. 
brought to light the principle which gave it 
its binding force. The Law, as he contends, 



THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 65 

is of eternal obligation, and cannot be abol- 
ished so long as heaven and earth endure. 
" Think not that I came to destroy the law 
and the prophets; I came not to destroy but 
to fulfil." The new way of life does not 
abolish the Law, but shows that it cannot be 
abolished. On the other hand, the old way 
of basing it upon external authority and cus- 
tom destroys its very foundation. The source 
of all morality is to be found, not in the ex- 
ternal act, but in the inner spirit from which 
the act proceeds, and when this is once seen 
it becomes evident that the legalism of the 
scribes and Pharisees is antagonistic to any 
genuine morality. 

The Law which is thus declared to be eter- 
nal and indestructible is the Law in its moral, 
as distinguished from its ceremonial, part. 
It is the Law as interpreted from the point 
of view of the prophets. This distinction of 
the ethical from the ceremonial part of the 
Law is of itself an important advance. It is 
a distinction which could have no meaning 
for the scribes and Pharisees, who had no 
criterion by which to separate between what 



66 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

was based upon the unchanging nature of 
man and what held good only under special 
circumstances and at a given stage in the 
development of humanity. For, as we have 
seen, a law which is accepted purely upon 
authority, is all equally binding. But this is 
not all ; for not only does Jesus distinguish 
the ethical from the ceremonial part of the 
Law r , but he goes back beyond the traditional 
morality of his day to the fundamental moral 
ideas expressed in the Law and the prophets, 
and disengages the principle upon which 
they rest Thus he is enabled to grasp the 
Law in its purity and universality, and to 
contrast it with the unspiritual interpretations 
of the scribes. 

Take, e.g. the command : " Thou shalt 
not kill." The scribes, in accordance with 
their usual conception of morality as a sys- 
tem of external rewards and punishments, 
add the gloss: "Whosoever shall kill, shall 
be in danger of the judgment." The sanc- 
tion of the Law is thus made to consist, 
not in the sacredness of human life, but in 
the fear of punishment here or hereafter. 



THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 67 

The principle upon which the Law is based 
is therefore destroyed. The appeal is to a 
purely selfish motive, and with that appeal 
the whole moral aspect of the Law disap- 
pears. Jesus, on the other hand, insists that 
the command rests upon the purely moral 
principle of love, and that the Law is vio- 
lated in its essence, not merely in this ex- 
treme expression of hatred, but in hatred in 
all its forms, or rather in that evil disposi- 
tion which is the source of all hatred. The 
outward act has no moral meaning in itself; 
murder is not the mere taking away of life, 
but the taking away of life from hatred to 
one's fellow-man ; and therefore anger, want 
of sympathy, and contempt, as springing from 
the same corrupt source, the unloving heart, 
are worthy of the most extreme punishment, 
the "hell of fire." Thus the Law is seen to 
exclude the whole range of malevolent pas- 
sions and even the faintest taint of hatred. 
Jesus was therefore justified in saying that 
the righteousness of his followers must " ex- 
ceed the righteousness of the scribes and 
Pharisees," and "exceed" it not merely in 



68 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

degree, but in kind. The distinction, in fact, 
is infinite. The scribes, in conceiving moral- 
ity to consist solely in conformity to an ex- 
ternal rule, irrespective of the motive from 
which the act proceeded, virtually did away 
with the whole principle of morality; and, by 
their reduction of morality to a system of 
external rewards and punishments, they vio- 
lated the very essence of morality, which rests 
upon the universal principle of brotherly love. 
To this it is added that morality is the pre- 
requisite of all true worship: no genuine re- 
ligious act can be performed by the man who 
nourishes in his heart a grudge against his 
neighbour. Lastly, Jesus traces back the 
ethical principle of love to one's neighbour to 
a fundamental identity in the nature of God 
and man : hatred brings upon the man who 
nourishes it its own punishment, just because 
he is violating what is his own real self; and 
hence, though he may escape external punish- 
ment, he cannot possibly escape the most ter- 
rible of all punishments, — that which consists 
in the loss of the blessedness which springs 
from the consciousness of unity with God. 



THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 69 

The same principle is applied to other 
moral laws ; in all cases Jesus traces back 
the command to its source in the nature of 
man as identical in nature with God. At 
the close of his treatment of this theme he 
expands the principle of morality so as to 
embrace all men, and he elevates it into in- 
finity. The Law had said: "Thou shalt not 
hate thy brother in thine heart, thou shalt 
not be angry with the children of thy peo- 
ple, thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself 
(Lev. xix. 17, 18)." From this precept came 
the characteristic Pharisaic deduction : " Thou 
shalt be angry with the stranger, thou shalt 
hate thine enemies." Thus national hatred 
was not only condoned, but was actually made 
a principle of action, and surrounded with all 
the sanctity and solemnity of a divine com- 
mand. Now even Plato reached the concep- 
tion that " it was better to suffer than to do 
injustice." Jesus goes altogether beyond this 
negative attitude. " Love your enemies, and 
pray for them that persecute you." This is, 
indeed, a " new commandment." It is the 
very core of Christian ethics — that which 



yo THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

gives it its superiority, and makes it incon- 
ceivable that its principle can ever be tran- 
scended. Moreover, this supreme ethical 
principle is immediately connected with the 
distinctively Christian idea of God, as the 
"Father" of men, whose love has absolutely 
no limits. As a symbol of this all-embracing 
love, he " maketh his sun to rise on the 
evil and the good, and sendeth his rain on 
the just and the unjust." " Therefore," con- 
cludes Jesus, "Ye shall be perfect as your 
heavenly Father is perfect " ; Le. man, finite 
and sinful as he is, is yet capable of living a 
divine life, of repeating on an infinitesimal 
scale the large all-embracing charity of his 
heavenly " Father." 

Jesus has thus vindicated the " Law " as an 
expression of the fundamental moral ideas 
which constitute the soul of society. It is 
evident, however, that in tracing back those 
ideas to their source, he has raised them to a 
plane which was never dreamt of before ; in 
other words, he has virtually abolished the 
conception of man and God upon which the 
Jewish religion rested. At the same time 



THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL y\ 

the new way of life is not an absolute change, 
but a development. The moral laws won 
for humanity by the toil and suffering of the 
Jewish people were not lost, though they 
underwent expansion and specification by 
the appreciation of the principle of universal 
brotherhood. Of this double relation Jesus 
was perfectly conscious. Hence, while on 
the one hand he affirms the eternal obliga- 
tion of the Law, he asserts with equal deci- 
sion that the new principle which he brought 
to light separates the new world from the 
old as by an impassable barrier. " From the 
days of John the Baptist until now the king- 
dom of heaven suffereth violence, and men 
of violence take it by force. For all the 
prophets and the Law prophesied until John." 
The '" kingdom of heaven," as he implies, is 
for the first time revealed as it is, i.e. as 
actually present, and men are pressing into 
it now that it has been revealed. The 
prophets spoke only of a future kingdom, 
living merely in the hope that somehow and 
at some time God would bring about the 
reign of righteousness upon the earth. Now 



72 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

men live in the glad consciousness that the 
reign of righteousness, which to the prophets 
seemed afar off, has actually begun. Hence 
Jesus speaks of the Baptist as having reached 
a higher stage of truth than the prophets. 
" Verily I say unto you, among them that 
are born of women, there hath not arisen a 
greater than John the Baptist." But he 
immediately adds : " Yet he that is but little 
in the kingdom of heaven is greater than 
he." So radical is the change introduced by 
the new revelation that it lifts those who 
accept it to a higher plane of truth than the 
Baptist, who still conceived of the kingdom 
of heaven as future, and who had not dis- 
covered the central truth that the kingdom 
of heaven was capable of being realised the 
moment it was discovered to consist in an 
unlimited love to God and man. Thus Jesus 
was perfectly aware that old things had passed 
away, and all things had become new. Nor 
had he any doubt of the absolute truth of his 
own doctrine. " All things have been deliv- 
ered unto me of my Father; and no one 
knoweth the Son, save the Father, neither 



THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 73 

doth any know the Father save the Son, and 
he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal 
him." The revelation which he had to make 
to the world was an entirely new revelation. 
" Verily I say unto you that many prophets 
and righteous men have earnestly desired to 
see what ye see, and have not seen it, and 
to hear what ye hear and have not heard it." 
Yet, while he declares that his gospel is new, 
Jesus has too much insight into the pre- 
sentiment of the truth, which half consciously 
worked in the highest minds of the past, not to 
be aware that the principle which he brought 
into the full light of day had been vaguely 
felt by religious men in all ages. The princi- 
ple of evolution of which so much is now said 
has never been applied more precisely to the 
development of religious ideas than by Jesus. 
The ideas of Jesus are all so closely 
connected, flowing as they do from a single 
principle, that it is impossible to treat of one 
aspect of his teaching without some reference 
to the other aspects. Hence it has not been 
possible to speak of his attitude towards the 
Law without to some extent anticipating what 



74 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

has now to be said in connexion with his atti- 
tude to the Messianic hopes of his country- 
men. In what follows it will be advisable to 
consider this question in relation to (i) the 
general view of the scribes, (2) the higher view, 
rather felt than clearly formulated, by men of a 
more spiritual type. The points of agreement 
between these two classes of mind lay in the 
conviction that the world had been given over 
to wicked men and to the machinations of 
the devil and his angels ; but that a time was 
coming when this state of things would be 
completely reversed, and a reign of righteous- 
ness set up upon the earth under the Messiah. 
But while there was a general agreement on 
these points, there was a radical difference in 
the conception of " righteousness," and as a 
consequence in the conception of the Messiah. 
Let us look first at the general view of the 
scribes and Pharisees. 

(1) As we have already seen, their dissatis- 
faction with the evil of the present was closely 
connected with their legalistic ideas. To them 
it seemed that, by the terms of the covenant 
made between God and His own peculiar peo- 



THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 75 

pie, Israel had a right to national indepen- 
dence, and even to sovereignty over all nations, 
as a reward for her devotion to Jehovah ; or 
at least she was entitled to expect this reward 
when she fully implemented her part of the 
contract. Starting from this legal point of 
view, the evil of the present was explained as 
flowing from a failure to fulfil the terms of the 
covenant. God "does not exercise His king- 
ship to its full extent, but on the contrary ex- 
poses His people to the heathen world-powers, 
to chastise them for their sins." By " sins " the 
Pharisees, of course, meant a want of conform- 
ity to the Law. Because of this disobedience, 
pain and sorrow prevailed, and especially 
those mental diseases which were directly re- 
ferred to demoniac possession. For the same 
reason Israel groaned under the iron despot- 
ism of Rome. It is obvious that the future 
kingdom of God, which was to be ushered in 
by the Messiah, could only be conceived as 
consisting in the absence of pain and suffering, 
in dominion over the heathen, and in the rule 
of the saints, i.e. of those who were rigid in 
the practice of the Law. 



j6 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

Now the Pharisaic ideal of a kingdom of 
heaven, consisting in the absence of pain and 
suffering, in earthly sovereignty, and in the 
rule of Pharisaic saints, was one which Jesus 
could not possibly endorse. Denying in limine 
the whole conception upon which it rested, he 
could admit neither the Pharisaic conception 
of the present, nor their vulgar ideal of the 
future. The legalistic idea of a contract be- 
tween God and Israel, the terms of which 
were that the pious Israelite who conformed 
to the letter of the Law had a right to freedom 
from suffering and to external sovereignty, was 
for him a profoundly immoral and irreligious 
conception ; and the assumption that the gov- 
ernment of God was not just and righteous 
was to him blasphemous. The world had 
never ceased to be the object of God's loving 
care, and therefore the coming of the king- 
dom of God could not mean a sudden and 
miraculous manifestation of His power. The 
spirit of God was present in the world of 
nature and in the consciousness of man. The 
obstacle to the reign of righteousness was in 
the blindness and sin of man, not in God. It 



THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL jj 

was want of faith, and the sin which inevitably 
flowed from it, that explained the suffering 
and evil of the present. 

We have seen how Jesus opposes to the 
legalism of the Pharisees his conception of a 
righteousness which consists in active efforts 
for the moral purification of the individual 
soul, a purification which could proceed only 
from love to God and man. Absolute faith 
in the goodness of God was the key-note of 
all his teaching. But if, as Jesus maintained, 
the essential nature of God is love for all 
creatures, and especially for man, how did he 
explain the existence of suffering and evil ? 
How was the righteous government of God 
to be reconciled with the apparent triumph 
of evil ? The optimism which shuts its 
eyes to the misery and wickedness of the 
world was to him a false and delusive creed. 
The wretchedness and evil of man were only 
too palpable. Jesus faced the facts with a 
perfectly clear consciousness of their force. 
No one was ever more sensitive to the suf- 
ferings of others than he ; but he refused to 
see in suffering a proof of the indifference or 



78 THE CHRISTIAN' IDEAL OF LIFE 

injustice of God. His explanation of suffer- 
ing was that it is a necessary step in the 
whole process by which man is lifted to a 
higher plane. To the Pharisees suffering- 
was the result of the want of obedience to the 
Law, and therefore it seemed to them that, 
with the advent of the Messiah, and the de- 
struction of all who transgressed the Law, suf- 
fering would disappear. Jesus also believes 
in the gradual disappearance of suffering, but 
he refuses to connect it with external conform- 
ity to the Law. The destruction of suffering 
must come from the efforts of loving hearts, 
not from any miraculous change in the con- 
ditions of human life. Suffering is not, or 
at least not merely, a punishment for sin, but 
a divinely ordained means for calling out the 
higher energies of the soul. 

As in the view of the Pharisees suffering 
was the result of transgression of the Law, so 
also was the oppression of Israel by heathen 
powers. Hence they believed that, when the 
Messiah should come, the independence of 
Israel would be restored, and the whole world 
should come under the sway of " the saints." 



THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 79 

Now, it has been maintained that Jesus, as 
an ardent patriot, shared in the hopes of his 
countrymen, and looked forward to the future 
sovereignty of Israel. This view cannot be 
accepted. For (a) even if Jesus cherished the 
hope of the external sovereignty of Israel, 
he could not possibly accept the ideal of the 
Pharisees. An Israel in which the whole gov- 
ernment should be in the hands of " saints " 
of the Pharisaic type was something too dread- 
ful to contemplate. No doubt Jesus was in- 
tensely patriotic in the sense of desiring that 
Israel should be the leader in the spiritual 
regeneration of the world, and it is probable 
that in the earlier days of his ministry he 
cherished the hope of persuading his coun- 
trymen to accept the new revelation. But, 
whether this was so or not, it is manifest 
that he came to see that the deep-rooted 
prejudices and externalism of the mass of the 
people, and the malignant opposition of the 
ruling classes, were too strong to be over- 
come. Recognising this clearly, it was im- 
possible for him to believe that Israel should 
be raised to a supremacy over the heathen. 



8o THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

(b) Belief in the future rule of Israel was in- 
separably connected in the Jewish mind with 
the advent of a Messiah, who should ascend 
the throne of David and rule over a subject 
world. When, therefore, Jesus admitted to 
his disciples that the Messiah had already 
come in his own person, he plainly acknow- 
ledged that he had abandoned the whole set 
of ideas upon which the future political su- 
premacy of Israel was based. The kingdom 
of heaven had already come, and it was not 
an earthly but a spiritual kingdom. In this 
kingdom he who was least was greatest, and 
indeed the spiritual power of the true Messiah 
— the power of loving service — was contrasted 
with the earthly power which consisted in rul- 
ing over a subject people, (c) While main- 
taining that the kingdom of heaven has 
already come, Jesus counsels submission to 
the established power of Rome, showing that 
in his mind the rule of righteousness was 
not dependent upon the political supremacy 
of Israel. His answer to the mother of Zebe- 
dee's children has been strangely cited as a 
proof that he looked forward to the earthly 



THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 8 1 

rule of the "saints." Nothing, in fact, could 
more clearly show that, in his mind, the king- 
dom of heaven was entirely independent of 
earthly power. To the naive materialism of 
the good woman, who desired that her two 
sons should sit, one on his right hand and 
the other on his left, he answered : " Can ye 
be baptised with the baptism wherewith I 
have to be baptised?" In other words, he de- 
clares rank in the kingdom of heaven to con- 
sist in enlarged possibilities of loving service, 
not in outward pomp and sovereignty. And 
he significantly adds : " To sit on my right 
hand or on my left is not mine to give," i.e. 
the future is in the hands of God. The atti- 
tude of Jesus, as we may be sure, was one of 
such absolute trust in God, that he was quite 
prepared to accept the continued political de- 
pendence of Israel, if that were the will of 
God ; and indeed towards the end of his life 
he seems to have seen perfectly clearly that 
the popular conception of the Messiah, which, 
in spite of all his efforts to turn it into a new 
channel, had taken firm hold upon the public 
mind, and was encouraged for their own ends 



82 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

by the Pharisees, could only result in the com- 
plete subjugation of Israel and the destruction 
of the temple service. In any case, the king- 
dom of heaven was so purely spiritual in its 
character that it could not possibly be con- 
nected in the mind of Jesus with the political 
supremacy of Israel. No doubt he wisely 
limited his efforts to "the lost sheep of the 
house of Israel/' but this limitation was never 
in his mind connected with a belief in the 
future political sovereignty or even indepen- 
dence of Israel, but only with his ardent de- 
sire to secure the spiritual salvation of his 
countrymen, and through their instrumental- 
ity of the whole human race. The bitter- 
ness and hatred of the Pharisees, and of all 
who cherished ambitious hopes for the future 
of Israel, is largely explained by the way in 
which Jesus trampled upon all their cher- 
ished prejudices and political expectations. 
Not only did he tear off the garb of self- 
righteousness which they had wrapped around 
them ; not only did he denounce them as ene- 
mies of true religion and morality ; but he 
counselled what they regarded as a tame sub- 



THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 83 

mission to the oppressive heathen power of 
Rome. Such a profound antagonism of ideals 
could only have one issue: the worldly material 
ideal must triumph for a time, only to be ulti- 
mately overcome by the intrinsically stronger 
ideal. Of this issue Jesus was clearly con- 
scious, and therefore he warned his disciples 
that he would be the victim of the unholy rage 
of the rulers and their blind followers ; while 
yet he announced with absolute confidence 
that the good cause would ultimately prevail. 
His optimism was therefore so profound and 
so robust, that even the worst expression of 
hatred and rancour did not destroy his faith. 
The passionate hatred with which he was pur- 
sued to the death was interpreted by him as a 
perversion of the inextinguishable desire for 
goodness which is inseparable from the con- 
sciousness of self. " Father, forgive them, for 
they know not what they do," is the expres- 
sion of an optimism which rises triumphant 
over even the worst form of evil. 

(2) The attitude of Jesus towards those 
pious souls who were disturbed by the ap- 
parent triumph of evil without and within, 



84 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

was very different from the stern and un- 
compromising antagonism which he displayed 
toward the Pharisees. What disturbed the 
ordinary pious Jew was, not so much the 
prosperity of the wicked, as the prosper- 
ity of the heathen. Israel was the chosen 
people of God, and yet the "sinners of the 
Gentiles," i.e. the unholy nations, who had 
left Jehovah and given themselves up to 
idolatry and unclean rites, seemed to receive 
greater favour from God than the people 
whom He had chosen and who had remained 
faithful to Him. His special perplexity was 
the apparent injustice of God. A partial 
answer was no doubt found in the belief 
that God was chastising His people for their 
sins, and that He made use of the heathen, 
wicked as they were, as the instruments of 
His will. But the pious Jew never aban- 
doned the belief that in some far-off time 
the favour of God would be restored to 
Israel, and that an awful day of reckoning 
would come for the heathen. 

Now, Jesus does not absolutely deny that 
there is a certain justification in the con- 



THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 85 

trast between the heathen and the Jew. To 
him also, the moral wickedness of the heathen 
and the grossness of their religious concep- 
tions seem palpable; but he entirely denies 
the assumption that the Jew has any claim 
upon God to be freed from oppression, or 
that there is anything incompatible with the 
justice of God in the political oppression 
of Israel. The first assumption arises from 
conceiving of righteousness as obedience to 
an external law; the second, from a mis- 
apprehension of the true end of life. Hence 
he seeks to show that the course of the 
world is not to be explained on the legal- 
istic supposition of an external system of 
rewards and punishments, or of a special 
claim on the part of the Jew to the favour 
of God. The righteous man has no right 
to an external reward for his righteousness ; 
the Jew has no claim as a Jew to the 
favour of God. For the end of human life 
is not external prosperity, but the develop- 
ment of the spirit. When this is once ad- 
mitted, the difficulty arising from the apparent 
triumph of the wicked assumes an entirely 



86 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

new aspect. External prosperity is no test 
of spiritual elevation. " What shall it profit 
a man if he gains the whole world and loses 
his life ? " The true nature of man is seen, 
not in his desire for the perishable things 
of this world, but in " hunger and thirst 
after righteousness.'' Nothing can satisfy 
man but the growth in him of the divine 
spirit, and he in whom that spirit dwells 
is not disturbed by the want of those things 
which are the mere accidents of existence, 
not its essence. What is called the pros- 
perity of the wicked is not true prosperity. 
This is the idea which Jesus enforces in 
that part of the Sermon on the Mount 
which he seems to have addressed to those 
who came to hear him, attracted by some- 
thing kindred in themselves. " Lay not up 
for yourselves treasures upon earth; but lay 
up for yourselves treasures in heaven." The 
true life does not consist in the attainment 
of finite and limited ends, but in the pos- 
session of that which is eternal and im- 
perishable. The beginning of spiritual life, 
therefore, consists in an entire surrender of 



THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 87 

the finite. But this is only the negative 
side of his teaching: the positive side is the 
direction of the whole being to the infinite 
and eternal, or the laying up of "treasures 
in heaven." This, of course, does not mean 
that man is to separate himself from all 
earthly concerns, and set his affections upon 
the future life, in the sense of looking for- 
ward to a reward which it is hopeless to 
expect in the present life. The " heavenly 
treasures " do not consist in outward quali- 
fications, either there or here, but in a 
"change of mind," which transforms the 
whole spirit, and throws a new light upon 
all things. " If thine eye be single, thy 
whole body shall be full of light." So when 
the "minds eye" is single, the whole world 
assumes a new aspect. This transformation 
of the soul is the new creation of the world : 
the mind to which everything seemed an in- 
soluble riddle now sees the confused and 
indistinct mass of objects fall into their 
proper place in the organic unity of the 
whole. All finite ends are universalised when 
they are viewed by reference to God, and 



88 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

all worthy action is then seen to consist in 
the service of God. " Ye cannot serve God 
and mammon." 

Now, if the true life of man consists in the 
service of God, the wicked must not be re- 
garded as prosperous, but as miserable in the 
extreme. They have lost what Dante calls 
the "good of the intellect," — that rational 
good which is the source of all joy and peace. 
There can be no need to " justify the ways of 
God" by any far-fetched attempt to explain 
why wickedness is rewarded and righteous- 
ness punished. Wickedness is never rewarded, 
and righteousness is never punished. It is 
no reward to "lose ones life": it is no pun- 
ishment to " save ones life." For he who 
seeks the lower misses the higher, while he 
who seeks the higher has the lower " added 
to him." In other words, devotion to uni- 
versal or impersonal ends — to all that makes 
for the good of the whole — is the secret of 
blessedness. By giving up his exclusive self 
man gains a wider self, which is the true self. 
And this true self is but another name for 
life in God. For the only reason why in 



THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 89 

this higher life man is in unity with himself 
is because he is in unity with the whole ten- 
dency of the world, ix. with the will of God. 
In his earlier teaching Jesus seeks to com- 
mend the new way of truth by showing that 
the love of God is revealed in nature as well 
as in human life. We have seen how, in later 
Judaism, the decay of prophetic inspiration 
and devotion to the letter of the Law resulted 
in ultimately making God a name for an in- 
definable Power, not revealed in the world, 
but concealed behind an impenetrable veil. 
Thus the tendency, which was always pres- 
ent in the Jewish religion, reached its climax. 
Now Jesus entirely reverses this conception 
of a purely transcendent God. God is in- 
deed the Creator of the world, but He is best 
seen, not in the great and terrible forces of 
nature, but in its silent and orderly processes, 
and in the purposive energy which works in 
the life of flower and bird and beast. He 
does not stand apart from nature in lonely 
isolation, but His spirit pervades all things 
and quickens them by its presence. Hence 
in his parables Jesus finds the evidence of 



90 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

God's goodness in the ordinary occurrences 
of the homely earth. There is a tender and 
solemn light on the most familiar things be- 
cause God is felt to be present in them, not 
hidden behind them. Especially in the life 
and growth of nature Jesus finds evidence 
of the continuous and loving care of God. 
With penetrative imagination he sees the 
formative activity of God working in the 
beauty with which He clothes the grass of 
the field, which to-day is and to-morrow is 
cast into the oven ; in the lilies, clothed in a 
glory exceeding all the splendour of human 
art ; in the insignificant mustard-seed, which 
expands in harmony with all the skyey influ- 
ences into the organic unity of root, stem, 
leaves, and blossoms, with the birds swaying 
in its branches. Thus God works not upon 
but through the things which have come 
from His hands. Nature is not a dead ma- 
chine, wielded by the hands of omnipotence, 
but it is instinct with that eternal principle 
of life which exhibits itself in the ever-recur- 
ring cycle of changes, inorganic and organic. 
To the eye of Jesus, nature is thus a mani- 



THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 91 

festation of the wisdom and loving care of 
God ; and he asks if it is credible that He 
who takes such pains to fashion and provide 
for the life of plant and animal is less inter- 
ested in man. " Behold, the birds of the 
heaven, that they sow not, neither do they 
reap, nor gather into barns, and your heav- 
enly Father feedeth them. Are not ye of 
much more value than they?" 

The "free and friendly eyes" with which 
Jesus in the earlier years of his ministry con- 
templated nature never deserted him; but, as 
the malevolence and opposition of the scribes 
and Pharisees with their blinded followers 
increased, the problem of evil demanded even 
a deeper faith. There was to him no real 
trial of faith in the external prosperity of the 
wicked, for he saw that the wicked received 
precisely the reward which their acts de- 
manded ; but the apparent success of the op- 
position to the work of God seemed to demand 
another explanation. Having absolute faith 
in the saving power of love, he yet found 
that in the majority of his countrymen his 
revelation only provoked a more bigoted be- 



92 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

lief in their own unspiritual ideas and a 
hatred of the truth that was growing in in- 
tensity until, as he foresaw, the sacrifice of 
his own life would be the inevitable result. 
A similar result, it was evident to him, must 
follow the diffusion of the truth in all ages. 
The conflict of principles must ever call into 
play all that is best and all that is worst in 
man. " Think not that I came to send peace 
on the earth : I came not to send peace, but 
a sword." How is this weakness of the 
good cause to be explained ? Has God in 
truth, as the majority believed, given over the 
world to the rule of Satan ? 

The answer of Jesus reveals the infinite 
depth of his optimism. The triumph of the 
evil cause is no triumph, but a defeat. For 
in what does it consist? It cannot kill the 
truth itself, which is eternal, but only the 
body of those whose lives are a witness of its 
power. There is nothing in life so pathetic 
as the temporary triumph of a bad cause ; 
for that triumph means that for a time men 
in their delusion are shut out from the bless- 
edness of unity with God, and therefore with 



THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 93 

themselves. On the other hand, those who 
live in the truth have the whole tendency of 
things on their side, and conscious of this 
they cannot be touched in the centre of their 
being. Still the problem remains: why does 
evil apparently triumph? A partial answer 
is, that its triumph is only apparent — it is 
never complete, and it has no permanency. 
But more than this : its temporary triumph is 
essential to the full disclosure of all that the 
truth contains. The false principle must 
show its bitter fruits, and must accomplish its 
perfect work before it completely reveals its 
true nature. Hence, the more it outwardly 
triumphs and shows its evil nature, the more 
surely is the way prepared for its final over- 
throw. "Where the carcase is, there are the 
vultures gathered together." Man can only 
seek for truth and goodness, and if for a 
time he turns his energies against the good 
cause, it is not in the spirit of a being who 
desires evil — for man is not a devil, but in 
his real being a u son of God" — but in his 
confusion of the true with the false. Hence 
the outward success of the bad cause is a 



94 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

real failure. Just as man cannot find rest in 
any finite end, so he can never be satisfied 
permanently with anything short of the truth. 
It is the truth he is really seeking, and at 
last the truth must prevail. Thus Jesus finds 
in the worst form of evil a "soul of good- 
ness." The world is through and through 
the product of divine love. 

Now, with this grasp of the principle that 
the good cause must ultimately prevail, while 
yet it implies a conflict with the opposite 
principle of evil, Jesus saw that the kingdom 
of heaven was a process, a development of 
the higher in its struggle with the lower. 
Nothing can ultimately withstand the princi- 
ple of goodness ; but in his blindness and 
evil will man may for a time turn his ener- 
gies against it. Hence the slow growth of 
the "kingdom of heaven, " — a growth so slow 
that it often seems to be arrest or even retro- 
gression. This idea is expressed by Jesus in 
a variety of figures. The kingdom of heaven 
is compared to the leaven, which was "hid in 
three measures of meal till the whole w r as 
leavened." The most striking expression of 



THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 95 

the idea, however, is given in that wonderful 
parable preserved in the oldest of the gospels, 
the gospel of Mark: "So is the kingdom of 
heaven as if a man should cast seed into the 
ground, and should sleep and rise day and 
night, and the seed should spring and grow 
up, he knoweth not how. For the earth 
bringeth forth fruit of herself; first the blade, 
then the ear, then the full corn in the ear. 
But when the fruit is ripe, immediately he 
putteth in the sickle, for the harvest is come." 
The attitude of Jesus towards the Messianic 
hope of his countrymen at once follows from 
his conception of the kingdom of heaven as 
already present, and yet as a process of conflict 
with evil. Holding these views he could not 
possibly believe in any sudden or miraculous 
change which should break the continuity be- 
tween the present and the future. Hence he 
refused to attest his divine mission by signs 
and wonders. When the Pharisees, in their 
usual crass materialism, demanded a " sign," — 
i.e. demanded that Jesus should virtually deny 
the presence of God in the ordinary processes 
of nature and in the normal experiences of 



96 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

human life — his answer was : " An evil and 
adulterous generation seeketh after a sign, and 
there shall no sign be given to it but the sign 
of the prophet Jonah." What he meant was, 
as Luke saw, that no " sign " could authenti- 
cate his mission but the truth which he pro- 
claimed. Truth "shines by its own light," and 
if men " will not hear Moses and the prophets, 
neither would they believe if one were to rise 
from the dead." Hence Jesus, though he em- 
ploys the apocalyptic imagery current in his 
day, entirely transforms the current conception 
of the future success of the kingdom of 
heaven. The triumph of good over evil, as he 
affirms, is not to be effected by catastrophe 
and revolution, but only by the persistent 
labours of those who live in the truth. His 
faith does not rest upon a superstitious belief 
in a sudden interposition from heaven. In his 
eyes good can be developed only through the 
loving efforts of those in whom the divine 
Spirit operates, and who " let their light so 
shine among men that others, seeing their 
good works, glorify their Father which is in 
heaven." Thus his optimism flows from abso- 



THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 97 

lute trust in the goodness of God, and in a rec- 
ognition that man in his ideal nature is a " son 
of God." For this reason he believes that to 
the success of the kingdom it is essential that 
each individual should have a personal experi- 
ence of the truth. This is indicated by the 
images of the leaven and the mustard-seed. 
He does not expect the triumph of goodness 
from any external arrangements of society, or 
rather he conceives of these as but the par- 
tial expression of a truth which must first 
exist in those whose hearts are open to the 
truth. At the same time, since the very 
essence of Jesus' teaching is the essentially 
social nature of man, the principle which he 
announced could not but manifest itself in a 
transformation of social and political institu- 
tions, though these can never be more than 
a partial expression of the idea of a king- 
dom in which the spirit of God is present 
in each member of the whole, at once dis- 
tinguishing and uniting them in an organic 
unity. 

In this conception of a spiritual commu- 
nity, in which each has found himself by los- 



98 THE CHRISTIAN- IDEAL OF LIFE 

ing himself, Jesus finds the answer to that 
longing for deliverance from the evil of their 
own hearts which was the saving salt in the 
aspirations of the pious souls of his own 
day. Just as he refuses to postpone the 
kingdom of heaven to some far-off day, when 
good shall conquer evil, maintaining that evil 
is already overcome in principle ; so he tells 
those who " labour and are heavy-laden," long- 
ing for a deliverance in which they have but 
faint belief, that the way to the conquest of evil 
in themselves is now open. And the secret 
is in identification with their brethren, the 
sons of the one Father. This was the secret 
of that triumphant optimism which nothing 
could destroy in him. This idea is expressed 
in the title which he most frequently applied 
to himself, the " Son of Man." This term 
is often used in the Old Testament, — for in- 
stance, in Ezekiel, — to express the weakness 
and dependence of man, as contrasted with 
the power and majesty of God. In Daniel, 
again, it refers not to a personal Messiah, 
but to the collective body of the saints, as 
contrasted with the great, victorious beasts, 



THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 



99 



the symbols of the powerful world-empires. 
"The core of Daniel's Messianic hope is the 
universal dominion of the saints." # Now 
if, as seems probable, Jesus adopted the term 
from Daniel, he meant by it to indicate, not 
merely the spirituality of his kingdom, but 
his own identity with the whole race. In 
any case, the essential meaning of the title 
is that Jesus conceived himself as part and 
parcel of humanity: in other words, he found 
the secret of life in complete identification 
with its joys and sorrows, its successes and 
sins. And because he was thus identified 
with man, he is also called the " Son of 
God." He was one with the Father in 
nature, though not in person, since he was 
conscious of himself as the medium through 
which the eternal love of God was revealed 
and communicated to men. Nothing can, 
in his view, withstand the power of love. 
Man, weak and sinful as he is, must suc- 
cumb to the omnipotence of goodness, for 
goodness is the spirit of the living God. It 
was with a full sense of the importance of 

* Schiirer's History of the Jeivish People, 2. 2. 138. 



I DO THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

the question that, towards the close of his 
life, he asked the disciples : " Who do ye say 
that the Son of Man is ? " And when Peter, 
in a flash of insight, answered : " Thou art 
the Christ, the Son of the living God," he 
immediately goes on to warn the disciples 
that he must " suffer many things of the 
elders and chief priests and the scribes, and 
be killed." He was the Messiah, just because 
it was his mission to effect the deliverance 
of mankind, not through outward triumph, 
but through suffering and death. To the 
disciples, with their preconception of a Mes- 
siah who should come invested with miracu- 
lous power and dignity, this was a " hard 
saying"; and the same apostle, who had for 
a moment got a glimpse of the divine human- 
ity of Jesus, now exclaims in horror: "Be 
it far from thee, Lord: this shall never be 
unto thee." Thus even Peter puts himself 
on the side of those who imagined that a 
suffering Messiah was a contradiction in 
terms. He had not learned the lesson of the 
divine life and teaching of the Master, and 
therefore Jesus rebukes him for the mate- 



THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL ioi 

rialism of his conception : " Thou art a stum- 
bling-block unto me : for thou mindest not 
the things of God, but the things of men." 
It is not by self-assertion and outward tri- 
umph, but by suffering and death, that the 
true Christ and his followers can save the 
world : " Whosoever would save his life shall 
lose it: and whosoever shall lose his life for 
my sake shall gain it." 

As he transforms the ordinary idea of the 
Messiah, so Jesus gives to the belief in a 
final judgment of the world a new and 
deeper meaning. The wicked and the right- 
eous are no longer distinguished as those 
who obey the law from those who violate it, 
but as those who love from those who are 
indifferent to their fellow-men. The whole 
system of external rewards and punishments 
is swept away, and in its place we have the 
one fundamental distinction of those whose 
lives are ruled by the spirit of brotherhood, 
and those who live for themselves. Under 
the guise of the current imagery of a Last 
Judgment, when all men shall be gathered 
together to receive their final sentence, Jesus 



102 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

inculcates the truth that the spiritual status 
of men is already determined by the prin- 
ciple which is outwardly expressed in their 
actions. " Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of 
these my brethren, even these least, ye did it 
unto me." Thus while he leaves untouched 
the current belief in a future judgment, he 
brings to the test of human action an entirely 
new standard. Not the pious works upon 
which men pride themselves, but the unselfish 
life, determines the eternal destiny of man. 
He who lives the divine life is he who, like 
the Master, has merged his own good in the 
good of the whole, and who has proved his 
love of man by the ordinary tender charities 
which seem so little, but mean so much. 

From what has been said we can understand 
the sense in which Jesus speaks of " Faith." 
To the scribes and Pharisees religion meant 
acceptance of the teaching of the doctors of 
the Law, as based upon their interpretations of 
scripture. Thus for the ordinary Jew there 
was a double wall of partition raised between 
him and God. Not only had he no direct con- 
sciousness of the divine nature, and therefore 



THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 



103 



of his own nature, but even the revelations of 
truth which were contained in scripture came 
to him through the distorted medium of tradi- 
tion. No doubt it was impossible to read the 
inspired words of legislator and prophet with- 
out catching something of their spirit ; but so 
overlaid was the sacred text with the prosaic 
and deadening interpretations of the scribes, 
which were dinned into his ears at home, at 
school, and in the synagogue, that it was hard 
for him to pierce through the mass of tradi- 
tional ideas to the truth which they over- 
laid and obscured. One consequence of this 
traditionalism was an incapacity to judge for 
himself when a new revelation of truth was 
presented to him. This was one of the great 
obstacles which Jesus met in his effort to 
bring his countrymen into living contact with 
the truth. The leaden weight of custom lay 
heavy upon the minds of " the people of the 
Law," and only by a powerful effort could they 
shake off the mass of prejudice and supersti- 
tion which they had been taught to regard as 
the revelation of God. And this intellectual 
difficulty was intensified by the spiritual arro- 



104 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

gance which had been engendered in their 
minds by the traditional belief in their unique 
position as the people of Jehovah. Thus the 
Jew had to free both his intellect and his con- 
science from the fetters of traditionalism be- 
fore he was in a position to look straight at 
the truth. This explains why Jesus insists 
upon " faith " as a child-like attitude. Only 
those from whose minds and hearts the arti- 
ficial veil of custom and pride of race had been 
removed were in a position to accept the new 
revelation of truth. It is in this sense, and not 
in the sense of unreasoning credulity, that he 
commends the " faith " of those who welcomed 
the truth. Thus for him " faith " is that open- 
ness to light which is a form of reason ; it is, 
in fact, reason in its purest form. What Jesus 
called upon men to believe he supported, 
not by an appeal to authority, but by an ap- 
peal to truth itself. He asked them to look 
with open eyes at the evidences of God's good- 
ness as exhibited in the world of nature ; to 
examine their own hearts, and to read the say- 
ings of the holy men of old with intelligence 
and insight. To the persistent demand for 



THE CHRISTIAN- IDEAL 105 

supernatural " signs " of his divine mission, he 
refused to listen, seeing in them but another 
form of that crude materialism which infected 
all their ideas. A saving " faith " he found in 
those few whose consciousness of their own 
weakness and sinfulness was so strong that, 
under the influence of his life and words, it 
removed the mist of tradition from their minds, 
and overcame the racial pride so natural in a 
Jew. " Faith " is thus that union of intellect- 
ual candour and moral simplicity which flows 
from the vision of God. It cannot be trans- 
ferred externally from one person to another, 
but is possible only in him who has surren- 
dered all that ministers to self-righteousness 
and selfishness. It is thus another name for 
the consciousness of unity and reconciliation 
with God, and for that " enthusiasm of hu- 
manity" which flows from it. " Faith," in other 
words, is the personal side of the whole con- 
sciousness of the " kingdom of heaven," as 
Jesus understood it : it is the spirit which 
operates in every member of those who are 
reconciled with God, and are therefore at 
unity with themselves and with one another. 



106 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

No doubt this faith has various degrees, but 
in essence it is always the same. It is also 
recognised by Jesus that it grows from age 
to age ; for, while he speaks of the Law and 
the prophets as giving a revelation of the 
divine nature, he also maintains that he has 
himself given a higher revelation of God than 
was possible to them. " Many prophets and 
righteous men have earnestly desired to see 
what ye see and have not seen it, and to 
hear what ye hear and have not heard it." 
Here, as always, Jesus holds by both sides 
of the truth : the essential identity of the 
religious consciousness in all ages, and the 
process of expansion which it undergoes as 
it comes to a fuller consciousness of what it 
contained implicitly from the first. 

There is one other aspect of Christ's 
teaching which must not be passed over. 
Although the Messianic hope was usually 
connected in the Jewish mind with the ap- 
pearance of an earthly Messiah, and the 
resurrection of the dead for judgment, it was 
also held by many that after the long reign 
of the saints there should follow an eternity 



THE CHRISTIAN- IDEAL 



107 



of bliss or woe in another world. Now, 
although Jesus gave a new meaning to the 
kingdom of heaven, and insisted that it 
already existed in the consciousness of those 
who were reconciled to God and devoted to 
the good of humanity, he also held the doc- 
trine of personal immortality. When the 
Sadducees came, demanding a proof of im- 
mortality, he appealed to the words of script- 
ure: "I am the God of Abraham and the 
God of Isaac and the God of Jacob," add- 
ing that " God is not the God of the dead 
but of the living." There was an especial 
appropriateness in this reply as directed 
against the Sadducees, who prided them- 
selves upon being faithful to the teaching of 
scripture, as distinguished from the tradi- 
tional interpretation accepted by the Phari- 
sees. But, as we have seen, Jesus does not 
accept even the teaching of the "Law and 
the prophets " without first bringing to bear 
upon it the light of his own higher con- 
sciousness, and hence we may be certain 
that these words were more than an argu- 
mentum ad hominem, intended to silence the 



108 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

Sadducees. The meaning of Jesus seems to 
be that, as the consciousness of the living 
God involves the consciousness of man as 
identical in his essential nature with God, 
we must believe in the eternal continuance 
of this fundamental relation. To see what 
man is in his true nature is to know that 
his life comes from God, and that only in 
the consciousness of his union with God 
does he learn what in essence he is. The 
essence of man is his life, i.e. his conscious 
existence, and this must be as eternal as 
God. The true destiny of man is to live in 
union with God, and this destiny cannot be 
taken from him by God whose son he is. 
Thus Jesus, as he conceives of God as the 
ever-living Father, also conceives of men as 
beings with an immortal destiny. The future 
existence of man he also conceives as a 
higher stage of being, when they shall be 
" as the angels," i.e. shall enjoy a clearer 
vision of God, and when goodness shall at 
last have overcome evil, and no longer be 
forced to engage in perpetual conflict with 
it. While Jesus thus maintains the personal 



THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 109 

immortality of man, he does not base upon 
it a proof of the reality of his view of life; 
on the contrary, he bases immortality upon 
the belief in God and the essential identity 
in nature of God and man. For he asserts 
that those who will not be convinced of the 
truth by " Moses and the prophets " would 
not believe " even if one were to rise from 
the dead." The order of ideas in his mind 
therefore is God, sonship, immortality. It is 
our knowledge of the nature of God which 
reveals to us his Fatherhood, and his Father- 
hood is the proof of the immortality of his 
children. 



CHAPTER V 

MEDIEVAL CHRISTIANITY 

In the last chapter an attempt has been 
made to present the Christian ideal of life, 
as set forth by its Founder. No attempt 
will here be made to deal with that impos- 
ing edifice of doctrine which was built up 
by St. Paul and the other apostles and 
by the subsequent reflection of Christian 
theologians; but it will help to throw the 
teaching of Jesus into bolder relief, if we 
contrast with it the Christianity of the Middle 
Ages. 

When we pass from the religion of Jesus 
to mediaeval Christianity, we seem to have 
entered into another world. The free and 
genial glance with which our Lord contem- 
plated nature, the triumphant optimism of his 
conception of human life, and his absolute 
faith in the realisation of the kingdom of 

no 



MEDIEVAL CHRISTIANITY \\\ 

heaven here and now, have been replaced by 
a hard and almost mechanical idea of the 
external world, by a stern denunciation of 
the utter perversity and evil of society, and 
by the postponement of the kingdom of 
heaven to the future life. How has this re- 
markable change come over the Christian 
consciousness? To answer this question 
would be a long task, and I shall only state 
three main characteristics in the mediaeval 
conception of life, trying to indicate how they 
originated. 

(i) The first characteristic to which I shall 
refer is the universal belief that the "king- 
dom of heaven," to use the term which Jesus 
so often employs, could not be realised in this 
life, but was entirely a thing of the future life. 
We can trace the gradual growth of this con- 
viction. The crucifixion of their Lord was a 
terrible shock to his disciples, and there is 
good reason to believe that for a moment 
it caused their belief in his Messiahship to 
waver. But, as the divine life and sayings of 
the Master came back to their remembrance, 
they began to understand what he had him- 



1 12 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

self always affirmed — that his kingdom was 
a spiritual one, which could be realised only 
by the destruction of evil and the triumph of 
righteousness. Yet they still clung to the 
idea that so great a revolution could be 
accomplished only by a sudden and miracu- 
lous change; and hence in the Apostolic Age 
the Christian, imperfectly liberated from the 
materialism of the ordinary Messianic concep- 
tion, imagined that the complete triumph of 
righteousness would take place in a few years 
by the second coming of the Lord to estab- 
lish upon earth the reign of peace and good 
will. Living in this faith, the primitive com- 
munity of Christians made no attempt to 
interfere with existing institutions, civil or 
ecclesiastical, but were content to prepare 
for the imminent advent of the Lord. But 
as time went on, and still the Lord did not 
appear, his advent came to seem more and 
more remote. Meantime the Christian found 
himself living in the midst of the decaying 
civilisation of Rome, and there was little won- 
der that the conversion of the world should 
seem an almost impossible task: — 



MEDIEVAL CHRISTIANITY 113 

Stout was its arm, each thew and bone 

Seemed puissant and alive, — 
But ah ! its heart, its heart was stone, 

And so it could not thrive. 

"How can these bones live?" he naturally 
exclaimed. How can this mass of corrup- 
tion be transformed into the divine image? 
Moreover, try as they might to avoid collision 
with the secular power of the Roman empire, 
the Christians found that they could not 
meet together for mutual encouragement and 
stimulation, without drawing suspicion upon 
themselves as a secret society plotting the 
overthrow of the empire ; and, indeed, though 
they had no such purpose, the Christian ideal 
was antagonistic to the pagan, and must at 
last meet with and overcome it, or be itself 
subdued. The outward symbol of this war 
of ideals was the persecutions to which the 
Christians were subjected in the second and 
third centuries. Thus the present world came 
to appear more and more a wilderness through 
which the little band of Christians was com- 
pelled to march, sad and solitary, on their 
way to the heavenly land. This sombre cast 



114 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

of thought never vanished from the Christian 
consciousness till the modern age, and per- 
haps it cannot be said to have quite vanished 
even now. One might have supposed that 
the more hopeful spirit of an earlier age 
would have come back when Christianity had, 
by its resistless energy, compelled the Roman 
empire, in the person of Constantine, to 
make terms with it. But the inrush of the 
fierce northern hordes into the Roman em- 
pire, and their facile conversion to Chris- 
tianity, confirmed in a new way the "other- 
worldliness " of the Church. For Christianity, 
to their rude and undisciplined minds, w r as in 
all its deeper aspects unintelligible, and its 
doctrines could only be accepted in blind and 
unquestioning faith. A superstitious rever- 
ence for the Church did not restrain them 
from the wildest excesses of passion, and the 
only curb to their brutal violence and self- 
will was the hope of future reward or the 
dread of future retribution. Thus mediaeval 
Christianity, unable to overcome the barbar- 
ism and lawlessness of the world, in a sort 
of despair sought comfort in the future life. 



MEDIAEVAL CHRISTIANITY 115 

This is the spirit which rules the whole of 
the Middle Ages, and it was one of the tasks 
of the Reformation to awaken anew the con- 
sciousness of the infinite significance of the 
present life as a preparation for the future 
life, and to quicken -all the institutions of so- 
ciety and all the powers of the individual soul 
with the divine spirit of pristine Christianity. 
(2) A second characteristic of the mediaeval 
period is a belief in the absolute authority of 
the Church in all matters of faith and wor- 
ship, and the consequent distinction between 
the clergy and the laity. This idea had its 
roots in the same principle as that which led 
to the conception of religion as essentially 
the hope of a future world. The rude bar- 
barian could not comprehend the doctrines 
of the Church, nor could his self-will be 
broken except by a power to which he was 
forced to bend his stubborn will. Hence the 
Church demanded implicit faith in its teach- 
ing, and absolute submission to its authority. 
Nor is it easy to see how otherwise the soil 
could have been prepared in which the new 
seed of the Reformation was to grow. The 



Il6 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

discipline of the mediaeval Church was, on the 
whole, as salutary as it was inevitable ; but dis- 
cipline is justifiable only as a preparation for 
the exercise of independence and reason; and 
hence the time inevitably came when men, hav- 
ing outgrown the stage of pupilage, asserted 
their indefeasible right to a rational liberty. 
This was the claim made by Luther when he 
unfurled "the banner of the free spirit." 

(3) The last characteristic of the Middle 
Ages to which I shall refer is the opposition 
of faith and reason. To come to its full rights 
as the universal religion Christianity had to 
free itself from all that was accidental and 
temporary in the conceptions of its first ad- 
herents. The first step in this process was 
taken when St. Paul disengaged it from the 
accidents of its Jewish origin and presented 
its essence in a clear and definite form. But 
the process could not end here, for every age 
has its own preconceptions and its own diffi- 
culties. When Christianity went beyond the 
boundaries of Judea, it had to meet and over- 
come the dualism of Greek thought, as it had 
met and overcome Jewish narrowness and ex- 



MEDIEVAL CHRISTIANITY 



117 



clusiveness. The victory was only imperfectly 
accomplished. The reconciling principle of 
the essential identity of the human and divine 
could not be abandoned without the destruc- 
tion of the central idea of Christianity, but 
the Church did not entirely escape the danger 
of making theology a transcendent theory of 
the absolutely inscrutable nature of God. At 
this imperfect stage of development Christian 
dogma was for a time arrested, so that when re- 
flection arose with Scholasticism the doctrines 
of the Church were assumed to be expressions 
of absolute truth, although they contained 
certain mysterious and incomprehensible ele- 
ments. There is indeed in the development 
of Scholasticism itself a growing consciousness 
of the antagonism of reason to the dogmas of 
the Church as commonly understood, a con- 
sciousness which in Occam even reaches the 
form of a belief that there are doctrines which 
are not only " beyond " but " contrary to " rea- 
son ; but the schoolmen never lost their faith 
in the truth of the dogmas, though they passed 
from credo ut intelligam to intelligo tit crcdam, 
and ended with credo quia impossible. When 



Il8 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAI OF LIFE 

r: thus came to be explicitly affirmed that the 
doctrines of the Church contained not merely 
su/>e?Tationa\ but irrational elements, the be- 
ginning of the end was near ; for reason, frus- 
trated in its attempt to find unity with itself 
in an authoritative creed, could only fall back 
in despair upon a universal scepticism or set 
about a reconstruction of the creed itself. 
Thus Scholasticism dug its own grave as well 
as the grave of mediaeval theology, and pre- 
pared the way for that great modern move- 
ment which began with the Renaissance and 
the Reformation and is still going on. Of one 
thing we may be sure, that nothing short of a 
perfect harmony of science, art, and religion 
can permanently satisfy the liberated human 
spirit. At such a harmony it is the hard task 
of philosophy to aim, and only in so far as it 
is secured can we hope for the return of that 
half-vanished faith in the omnipotence of good- 
ness with which Jesus was so abundantly filled. 
It is therefore proposed, in the second part of 
this work, to ask how far an idealistic phi- 
losophy enables us to retain the fundamental 
conception of life which was enunciated by 
the Founder of Christianity. 



PART II 

MODERN IDEALISM IN ITS RELATION 
TO THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 



CHAPTER VI 

GENERAL STATEMENT AND DEFENCE OF IDEALISM 

In his Foundations of Belief, Mr. Balfour 
raises an objection to the idealistic theory 
of knowledge, a consideration of which may 
help to bring out more clearly what is here 
meant by Idealism. This objection is di- 
rected primarily against what is claimed to 
be the doctrine of the late T. H. Green, but 
it is thought to apply with equal force 
against all who hold the idealistic view of 
the world. In what follows no attempt will 
be made to defend Green from Mr. Balfour's 
attack. It does not appear to me true that 
Green reduced the world to a " network of 
relations " ; but it seems better to avoid all 
disputes which turn upon the interpretation 
of an author who is not here to defend 
himself, and therefore I shall deal from an 
independent point of view with the difficulty 

121 



122 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

which Mr. Balfour has stated with his usuai 
force and clearness. 

The main charge made by Mr. Balfour 
against Idealism is that it " reduces all ex- 
perience to an experience of relations," or 
" constitutes the universe out of categories." 
Now, it is no doubt true, says our author, 
that we cannot reduce the universe to " an 
unrelated chaos of impressions or sensa- 
tions " ; but " must we not also grant that in 
all experience there is a refractory element 
which, though it cannot be presented in iso- 
lation, nevertheless refuses wholly to merge 
its being in a network of relations ? " If so, 
whence does this irreducible element arise? 
The mind, we are told, is the source of re- 
lations. What is the source of that which 
is related ? The " thing in itself " of Kant 
" raises more difficulties than it solves," and 
indeed, the followers of Kant themselves 
point out that this hypothetical cause of that 
which is " given " in experience cannot be 
known as a cause, or even as existing. But 
" we do not get rid of the difficulty by get- 
ting rid of Kant's solution of it. His dictum 



STATEMENT AND DEFENCE OF IDEALISM 123 

still seems to remain true, that * without mat- 
ter categories are empty.' And, indeed, it is 
hard to see how it is possible to conceive a 
universe in which nothing is to be permitted 
for the relations to subsist between. Rela- 
tions surely imply a something which is re- 
lated, and if that something is, in the absence 
of relations, ' nothing for us as thinking be- 
ings/ so relations in the absence of that 
something are mere symbols emptied of their 
signification." # 

Mr. Balfour, it would seem, rejects the 
sensationalist theory that knowledge is re- 
ducible to an association of individual feel- 
ings, and he also rejects the Kantian refer- 
ence of impressions of sense to a " thing in 
itself " ; but he is unable to see how the 
world can be explained without the retention 
of a " matter " to supply the concrete filling 
for the otherwise empty categories. His own 
view would therefore seem to be that the 
knowable world involves two distinct ele- 
ments, a " matter of sense " and the concep- 
tions or relations by which that " matter " is 

* Balfour's Foundations of Belief. Am. ed., pp. 144-5. 



124 THE CHRISTIAN' IDEAL OF LIFE 

formed. Where he differs from Idealism, as he 
understands it, is in denying that all reality 
can be reduced to relations of thought or 
pure conceptions. The force of Mr. Balfour's 
criticism, therefore, depends upon two assump- 
tions : firstly, that it is possible to retain the 
Kantian doctrine of a " matter of sense " 
after the rejection of Kant's assumption of a 
" thing in itself " ; and, secondly, that Ideal- 
ism seeks to construct the world out of 
empty conceptions or relations of thought. 
Both of these assumptions I venture to chal- 
lenge. 

(i) The Kantian doctrine of a "matter of 
sense " stands or falls with the assumption 
of a "thing in itself." In the ^Esthetic the 
problem of knowledge is put by Kant in this 
way: What is the element in the perception 
of objects as in space and time which belongs 
to the subject, and what is the element which 
belongs to the object? Kant's answer is, 
that the "form" under which objects are re- 
lated spatially and temporally is due to the 
subject, the " matter " so related to the ob- 
ject. Now, in this contrast of " form " and 



STATEMENT AND DEFENCE OF IDEALISM I2§ 

"matter," it is obviously assumed that the 
subject has a nature of its own independently 
of the object, and the object a nature of its 
own independently of the subject ; in other 
words, that, as existences, subject and object 
are unrelated to each other. On the other 
hand it is admitted by Kant that there can 
be no knowledge until the subject comes into 
relation to the object. 

Now, the assumption of the independent 
existence of subject and object is no doubt a 
very natural assumption, because, when we 
begin to explain knowledge, we already have 
knowledge. But we must not forget that, in 
accounting for the origin of knowledge, we 
have no right to assume the very knowledge 
we are seeking to explain. We cannot start 
from the independent existence of subject and 
object unless we can show that an indepen- 
dent subject and object can be known. Before 
we ask what is contributed by the subject, and 
what comes from the object, we must be sure 
that the separation of subject and object is 
admissible. If there is no known subject 
which does not imply a known object, the ele- 



126 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

ment belonging to the one cannot be sepa- 
rated from the element belonging to the other. 
When Kant asks " by what means our faculty 
of knowledge should be aroused to activity but 
by objects," he forgets that neither object nor 
subject exists for knowledge prior to know- 
ledge, and that to ask how the subject should 
be " aroused to activity " by the object is to 
ask how a non-existent object should act upon 
a non-existent subject. This question cannot 
be answered, because it is self-contradictory, 
for to a self-contradictory question no answer 
can possibly be given. 

But though Kant starts from the opposi- 
tion of subject and object, he takes, in the 
^Esthetic, the first step to effect its over- 
throw. The real object, he says, no doubt 
exists apart from the subject, but the known 
object does not. For, in the perception of 
objects, the relations of space and time are 
the manner in which the subject, when 
" aroused to activity," comes to have a con- 
sciousness of objects. So far, therefore, as 
knowledge goes, the object is not an inde- 
pendent existence, but an existence in and 



STATEMENT AND DEFENCE OF IDEALISM 127 

for a conscious subject. Now this view leads 
to an important change in our ordinary con- 
ception of the world. When we assume an 
objective world, fully formed and complete 
in itself, apart from the subject, we manifestly 
make the subject a mere passive spectator 
of a world from which it stands apart; and 
when we assume a subject with a complex 
nature of its own, we make the world en- 
tirely foreign to the subject. But the mo- 
ment we ask how this objective world 
becomes known to the subject, we find that 
the independence of each alternately disap- 
pears in the other. Thus, if the object is 
apprehended by the subject, and only in this 
apprehension exists for Jt, the whole objec- 
tive world is absorbed into the subject. On 
the other hand, if we ask what is the con- 
tent of the subject, we find that it is the 
object, and thus the subject is absorbed in 
the object. Kant, however, does not carry 
over the object as a whole into the subject, 
but draws a distinction between the element 
which comes from the object and the cle- 
ment which is added by the subject. In 



128 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

this way the identification of subject and ob- 
ject is partially arrested, and an intermediate 
region is assumed in which subject and ob- 
ject enter into relation with each other. This 
is the region of knowledge. But, while this 
union of subject and object is the condition 
of knowable reality, subject and object still 
remain apart as existences. Here, then, we 
have the " thing in itself," as it appears in 
the /Esthetic. 

The compromise which Kant here adopts 
is obviously untenable. If we are to as- 
sume the independent existence of subject 
and object, w r e must not at the same time 
assume that the one is dependent for its reality 
upon the other. Since the spatial and tem- 
poral relations have a meaning only within 
knowledge, they can no more belong to the 
subject than to the object, but only to the 
subject in so far as there has arisen for it 
the consciousness of an object determinable 
under those relations. Why, then, does Kant 
maintain that space and time are forms of 
perception, not determinations of the real ? 
He does so because he has not completely 



STATEMENT AND DEFENCE OF IDEALISM 129 

freed himself from the dualism of subject and 
object with which he starts. A subject as- 
sumed to exist apart from the object must 
be regarded as a pure blank so far as know- 
ledge is concerned ; and when it begins to 
know we must suppose it to be affected by the 
object. Thus it is regarded as purely recep- 
tive in its relation to the object, and there- 
fore it has to wait for the action of the object 
upon it. Now when we ask whether the sub- 
ject can be purely receptive, or whether it 
must not be affirmed to be at once receptive 
and conscious of being receptive, it becomes 
manifest that the whole conception of a purely 
receptive subject is unmeaning. If the sub- 
ject is receptive without being aware of it, 
it will simply exist in a series of individual 
states, without referring those states either to 
an object or to itself. For such a subject 
there can be no objective world ; for, as Kant 
himself tells us, the consciousness of objects 
implies " the reference of sensation to objects 
in perception." On the other hand, if the 
subject not only exists in a series of affec- 
tions, but is conscious of affections as coming 



130 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

from the object, it must distinguish them as 
its own and yet relate them to the object. 
But so far as it does so, the object is within 
knowledge, not a thing existing by itself. 
Thus the object has no existence for the sub- 
ject except as the subject distinguishes it from 
and yet relates it to itself. The object is the 
product of its own activity, and hence the 
subject cannot be receptive in regard to it. 
A subject which is not self-active is for itself 
nothing. In truth, a purely receptive subject 
is a contradiction in terms. It is only be- 
cause Kant does not distinguish between a 
subject which is purely sensitive — and only 
by an abuse of language can this be called 
a "subject" at all — and a subject which is 
conscious of its states as involving perma- 
nent relations, that he allows himself to speak 
of the subject as receptive in relation to the 
object. Whatever the object is, it is for a 
subject, and any other object is a fiction of 
abstraction. We may legitimately contrast 
the object as known in fuller determinateness 
with the object as less determinate, but the 
object is in either case a known object, not 



STATEMENT AND DEFENCE OF IDEALISM 131 

a " thing in itself." To contrast a known with 
an unknown object is the greatest of all ab- 
surdities, because an unknown object is simply 
nothing for the subject, and therefore cannot 
b2 contrasted with anything. 

It follows from what has been said that 
there can be no opposition between the " mat- 
ter " and the " form " of knowledge : no oppo- 
sition, that is, between a " matter " which 
comes from the object and a "form" contrib- 
uted by the subject. We must therefore deny 
that affections of sense as such enter into 
or form any element in knowable objects. 
Kant himself admits that such affections do 
not exist as an object for consciousness, but 
are merely the " manifold " out of which ob- 
jects are formed: they are the "matter" which 
becomes an object, when the subject combines 
its determinations under the form of time 
into an image or perception. But when the 
" manifold of sense" becomes an object, it 
is no longer a " matter" to which the subject 
has to give u form," but is already a formed 
matter. The subject does not first receive 
the " matter of sense," and then impose upon 



132 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

it its own forms ; only in so far as the " mat- 
ter " is already formed does it exist for the 
subject at all. The so-called "manifold of 
sense " is therefore just the distinguishable 
aspects of the world as these exist for the 
conscious subject. This world is indeed 
" manifold " in the sense of being infinitely 
concrete ; but its concreteness is not that of 
an aggregate of particulars, but of a " cosmos 
of experience," in which all the particulars 
distinguished are held together in the unity 
of a single world, which exists only for a com- 
bining self-active subject. 

(2) The denial of the fiction of a "matter 
of sense," entirely destitute of the unifying 
activity of intelligence, is therefore a very 
different thins; from the denial of all differ- 
ences and the reduction of reality to a "net- 
work of relations." Mr. Balfour's charge that 
Idealism reduces the world to relations, and 
therefore involves the absurdity of relations 
with nothing to relate, rests upon a misunder- 
standing of the idealistic theory of thought 
or intelligence as the constitutive principle of 
all knowledge and all reality. What Ideal- 



STATEMENT AND DEFENCE OF IDEALISM 133 

ism maintains is that the knowable world 
exists only for a thinking or self-conscious 
subject, and that even the simplest phase of 
knowledge involves the activity of that sub- 
ject. It is very inadequate and misleading 
to speak of thought as if it consisted solely 
in the relation of separate elements to one 
another. When thought is thus conceived, it 
is easy to understand why those who affirm 
that the world exists only for thought are 
supposed to be constructing reality out of 
pure abstractions. It is not difficult to show 
that this conception is a survival of the 
old untenable opposition of perception and 
thought, as dealing respectively with the par- 
ticular and the universal. Let us take a 
simple case by way of illustration. I perceive 
a speck of light in the surrounding darkness. 
Taking the old abstract view, we have here 
the simple apprehension of a particular sen- 
sible object, without any exercise of the activ- 
ity of thought. The latter comes into play 
only when I compare various perceptions with 
each other. Such a doctrine was virtually 
disposed of when Kant showed that the sim- 



134 THE CHRIST/ AX IDEAL OF LIFE 

plest perception already involves the synthetic 
activity of thought. My apprehension of the 
speck of light is by no means simple. The 
moment I have the sensation, my mind ^oes 
to work, seeking to put it in its proper place 
in relation to the rest of my experience. 
There are no doubt occasions in my indi- 
vidual life in which this interpretative power 
is almost entirely in abeyance, as when I 
have just awaked from sleep, or emerged 
from a swoon. But even in these states the 
activity of intelligence is not entirely absent; 
for I at least distinguish the speck of light 
from the surrounding darkness; I locate it 
with more or less accuracy; and I distinguish 
it from myself as a particular object. Now 
we have here one of the simplest forms in 
which the thinking subject builds up for him- 
self an intelligible world. Without the sensi- 
tivity to light, there would be for the subject 
no object at all; but without the interpreta- 
tive activity of thought the sensitivity would 
have no meaning, z.e. it would not be grasped 
as a particular phase of a single world. Per- 
ception is, therefore, not the mere presence of 



STATEMENT AND DEFENCE OF IDEALISM 135 

a particular sensation or image, but the dis- 
crimination of its elements, and the compre- 
hension of these as involving certain fixed 
conditions under which they occur. If we 
exclude the interpretative activity of thought 
there is for us no object; and, therefore, no 
knowledge. It is only because this grasp of 
the particular as an instance of fixed con- 
nexion in experience is overlooked, that per- 
ception is supposed to be possible without the 
combined distinction and unification which is 
due to the activity of the thinking subject. 
But this activity is not the external relation 
of individual sensations. Sensibility as such 
is not an object of knowledge, but only partic- 
ular sensations grasped as indicating fixed con- 
nexions in their occurrence. Hence thought 
is present in what is called sensation, in so far 
as sensation enters into our experience ; and 
when present it interprets sensation by refer- 
ence to its fixed conditions. The content of 
sensation does not fall without, but within 
thought ; and it is this thought content which 
constitutes the world of our perception. That 
world is from the first a connected whole, in 



1 36 THE CHRISTIAN- IDEAL OF LIFE 

which every element is on the one hand re- 
ferred to a single world, and on the other 
hand to a single subject. Nor can the one 
be separated from the other, for the unity of 
the world is made possible by the unifying 
activity of the subject. It must also be ob- 
served that this unifying activity is not the 
activity of a principle which merely operates 
through the individual subject: it is essen- 
tially the activity of a self-determining sub- 
ject, which is conscious of a single world only 
in so far as in every phase of its experience 
it is self-active. The degree in which the 
world is comprehended is proportionate to 
the self-activity of the intelligent subject; and 
thus the world, while it never loses its unity, 
is continually growing in complexity and sys- 
tematic unity. There is a single self-consist- 
ent world, because the world is a systematic 
unity, and because reason in all self-conscious 
beings is an organic unity, identical in nature, 
but distinct in its individual activity. Mr. 
Balfour assumes that the denial of a given 
" matter of sense " is the same thing as the 
denial of all determinate reality. But, in 



STATEMENT AND DEFENCE OF IDEALISM 137 

truth, the denial of the former is essential 
to the preservation of the latter. It is only 
in so far as the sensible is discriminated by 
thought, that there is any determinate object 
of knowledge; and it is only in so far as 
these discriminated elements are combined 
by the activity of a single subject, that there 
is any unity of experience. The thinking 
subject cannot have before him any object 
without grasping it by thought, or interpret- 
ing his immediate feelings by reference to 
the idea, explicit or implicit, of a connected 
system of reality. What Idealism maintains, 
therefore, is that the impossibility of having 
the consciousness of any object which cannot 
be combined with the consciousness of self is 
a proof that the world is a rational system. 
The whole process of knowledge consists in 
the ever more complete reduction of partic- 
ulars to the unity of an organic whole; and, 
though it is true that a complete knowledge 
of the world is never attained, Idealism affirms 
that, were knowledge complete, the world 
would be found to be rational through and 
through. Perhaps what has been said will 



138 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

help to show that what Idealism denies is 
not that the world is concrete, but that its 
concreteness can be explained by any theory 
which starts from the fiction of an irreducible 
"matter of sense," Le. a "matter" assumed 
to be absolutely opaque to a rational being. 

Mr. Balfour assumes that thought deals 
purely with abstractions or relations, and it 
is on this ground that he charges Idealism 
with "constituting the universe out of cate- 
gories." The falsity of this view has already 
been indicated, but the point is so important 
that it seems advisable to dwell upon it 
somewhat more fully, especially as even Mr. 
Bradley seems to me to have lent the weight 
of his authority to what I must regard as 
the survival of an obsolete mode of thought. 

There can be no thought whatever, whether 
it takes the form of conception, judgment, or 
inference, unless thought is itself a principle 
of unity. This unity, however, must not be 
conceived as working by the method of ab- 
straction, but as manifesting itself in the dis- 
tinction and combination of differences. We 
can, no doubt, fix our attention upon the unity 



STATEMENT AND DEFENCE OF IDEALISM 139 

which is implied in every act of thought, but 
we cannot affirm that thought is a unity 
which excludes differences. Thought is thus 
the universal capacity of combining differ- 
ences in a unity. Now, if thought is by its 
very nature a unity, there can be no absolute 
separation between the various elements which 
it combines — no separation, that is, within 
thought itself. It is perhaps not impossible 
that there are real elements which thought 
cannot reduce to unity, but within thought 
itself there can be no such elements: ele- 
ments which are not combined are not 
thought. We cannot therefore regard the 
organism of thought as made up of a num- 
ber of independent conceptions or ideas hav- 
ing no relation to one another; the whole of 
our conceptions taken together form the 
unity which thought by its activity consti- 
tutes. Conception is thus the process in 
which the distinguishable aspects of the real 
world, or what we believe to be the real 
world, are combined in the unity of a single 
system. This process may be viewed either 
as a progressive differentiation or as a pro- 



140 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

gressive unification. And these two aspects 
are essentially correlative: conception reaches 
a higher stage according as it unites a greater 
number of differences, and it cannot unite 
without distinguishing. It is of great impor- 
tance to keep hold of this truth. To neglect 
it is to make a consistent theory of know- 
ledge impossible. If conception is a process 
of abstraction, thought can by no possibility 
comprehend reality. The importance of the 
subject will excuse a few remarks upon the 
nature of "conception" and its relation to 
judgment. 

Conception may be regarded as the termina- 
tion or as the beginning of a judgment, accord- 
ing to our point of view. In the former case 
conception condenses, or holds in a transpar- 
ent unity, the distinguishable elements which 
have been combined in a prior judgment, or 
rather it is the synthetic unity of a number 
of prior judgments. Thus the conception 
" light " comprehends the prior judgments 
by which the object "light" has entered 
into the world of our thought. Hence it is 
that judgment has been supposed to be 



STATEMENT AND DEFENCE OF IDEALISM 14 1 

merely the analysis of a given conception. 
But no analysis of a conception can yield 
more than has previously been combined. 
The name " light " stands for more or fewer 
judgments according to the stage of thought 
of the individual who employs it. A so-called 
analytic judgment is simply the explicit state- 
ment of judgments already made, and adds 
nothing to the wealth of the thought-world. 
It is true that the resolution of a conception 
into the judgments which it presupposes may 
be the occasion of a new judgment. It is so 
when we for the first time observe that a con- 
ception does presuppose a number of judg- 
ments; but in this case we have done more 
than merely analyse the conception into its 
constituent elements : we have brought to 
light the nature of conception and its relation 
to judgment. 

It is characteristic of every real judgment — 
every judgment which is more than the repro- 
duction of a judgment formerly made — that 
it combines in a new unity elements not pre- 
viously combined. Can we then say that judg- 
ment is the combination of conceptions ? Not 



142 THE CHRISTIAN- IDEAL OF LIFE 

if we mean by this that the conceptions remain 
in the judgment what they were prior to the 
judgment. A conception being the condensed 
result of prior judgments in which distinguish- 
able elements of reality have been united, it 
forms the starting-point for new judgments, 
but each of these new judgments is the 
further comprehension of the real, and there- 
fore the conception grows richer in content 
with each judgment. Thus if, starting from 
the ordinary conception of " light," we go on 
to judge that it is "due to the vibration of 
an aether," we do not simply add a new 
predicate to the subject, but the conception 
is itself transformed and enriched. Judg- 
ment is thus conception viewed as in pro- 
cess, and a conception is any stage in that 
process. The distinction is purely relative. 
In judgment thought unifies the elements 
which it discriminates ; in conception the 
elements are viewed as united even while 
they are discriminated. For it must be 
observed that thought never unifies with- 
out discriminating: the whole process of 
thought is concrete throughout, and, as 



STATEMENT AND DEFENCE OF IDEALISM 143 

knowledge develops, becomes more and more 
concrete. We are therefore entitled to say 
that for the thinking subject reality is in 
continual process, and we are also entitled 
to say that there is neither thinking subject 
nor thought reality outside of the process of 
thought. A real world which is not capable 
of being thought is for the subject nothing, 
and a subject which is not capable of think- 
ing the real world is also nothing. 

If this view is correct, it is misleading to 
say, with Mr. Bradley, that "in judgment an 
idea is predicated of a reality." # For the 
reality of which we judge is a reality which 
exists only for thought, and it has no content 
except that which it has received in the pro- 
cess by which it is constituted for thought. 
Mr. Bradley tells us that whatever we regard 
as real has two aspects, (a) existence, (6) con- 
tent, and that " thought seems essentially to 
consist in their division." Now, it is no doubt 
true that, if we suppose the real to be some- 
thing which exists apart from thought, we 
shall have to divide or separate the " what " 

* Appearance and Reality -, p. 163. 



144 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

from the " that" But there is for us no 
real in addition to the real which is thought. 
Such a real is a pure abstraction, and means 
no more than the empty possibility of the real. 
We cannot separate in this hypothetical real 
between the " that " and the " what," because, 
having no content, it is neither a " that " nor a 
"what." The real only comes to be for us 
in so far as there has gone on a process of 
discrimination and unification within a sin- 
gle reality, by means of which the real has 
been constituted as a thought or ideal reality. 
What Mr. Bradley calls the " that " seems to 
me merely a name for the unity which is in- 
volved in every phase of the process by which 
reality is thought ; and what he calls the 
11 what " is a name for the elements which 
thought distinguishes and combines in the 
unity of the real. The " that " has therefore no 
determinateness when it is separated from the 
11 what " ; it is simply pure being, or the bare 
potentiality of a thought reality. Mr. Bradley 
allows himself to speak of the " what " as if it 
were first " presented " in unity with the " that," 
and of judgment as if it consisted in the 



STATEMENT AND DEFENCE OF IDEALISM 145 

" division " of the " what " from the " that." But 
surely there is no " what " except that which 
thought has already made its own. The sub- 
ject of any judgment has already a content, it 
is true, and this content we may express in the 
form of a series of judgments ; but these judg- 
ments will merely reproduce the judgments 
formerly made : they will add nothing to 
knowledge. Every new judgment, on the 
other hand, determines the conceived reality 
from which we start : it transforms the reality 
for thought, and thus enriches it by a new 
determination. There would be no reason for 
judging at all if judgment merely consisted 
in detaching a " content " from " existence," and 
then proceeding to attach it to " existence." 
The " existence " and the " content " are one 
and indivisible, and as the one grows, so also 
does the other. Mr. Bradley says that "an 
idea implies the separation of content from 
existence." And no doubt in every judgment 
the " content " is held suspended in thought 
before it is predicated of the subject. But, in 
the first place, so long as it is so held, there is 
no judgment: judgment consists in determin- 



146 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

ing the subject by the predicate. And, in the 
second place, the content which is thus predi- 
cated of the subject is not the content which 
is already involved in the subject, and there- 
fore we cannot say that judgment consists in 
the separation of the " what " from the " that." 
When the scientific man affirms that light is 
due to the vibration of an aether, he does not 
separate the " content " already involved in the 
conception of the luminous object, and then 
predicate this " content " of the subject ; what 
he does is to determine the already qualified 
subject by a totally new " content " which it 
did not previously possess, and in this deter- 
mination of the subject the judgment consists. 
It thus seems to me that Mr. Bradley gives 
countenance to two fallacies ; first, that the 
subject is a mere " that " instead of being the 
condensed result of the whole prior process of 
thought ; and, secondly, that judgment con- 
sists in the separation of a given content from 
the " that," a content which is then attributed 
to the " that " ; whereas judgment consists in 
the predication of a new content, which de- 
velops and enriches the " that." Whatever 



STATEMENT AND DEFENCE OF IDEALISM 147 

difficulty attaches to this view arises, as it 
seems to me, from the assumption that reality 
exists apart from the process by which it is 
thought And no doubt reality is not made 
by thought in the sense of being the creation 
of the individual thinking subject, but it is 
made for the subject in the sense that nothing 
is or can be real for him which is not revealed 
to him in the process by which he thinks it as 
real. 

When Mr. Bradley says that "the subject 
has unspecified content which is not stated in 
the predicate" (168), he is evidently confusing 
"the subject" with reality, as it would be 
could it be completely determined by thought. 
But such a subject is not the "that" which is 
distinguished from the " what," for the " that " is 
merely the abstraction of reality, — the abstract 
idea of reality in general which is no reality in 
particular. Such a subject has no " unspecified 
content," because it has no content whatever. 
But if by the " subject " is meant the complete 
system of reality, it is no doubt true that it has 
" unspecified content which is not stated in the 
predicate." No single judgment can express 



148 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

the infinite wealth of the totality of reality. 
And not only is this true, but no single judg- 
ment can express the wealth of reality even as 
it exists for the subject who frames the judg- 
ment. We can only express the nature of 
reality in the totality of judgments which ex- 
press the nature of reality as known to us, and 
it is manifestly an inadequate or partial view 
which seeks to limit known reality to that as- 
pect of it which is expressed in a single judg- 
ment. But we must go still further; not only 
is known reality not expressed in any single 
judgment, but it is not expressed in the whole 
system of judgments which embody the know- 
ledge of man as it exists at any given time. 
Our knowledge is not complete, and I do not 
see how it ever can be complete. In that sense 
reality or the absolute must always be un- 
known. But unless reality in its true nature 
is different in kind from the reality which we 
know, it must be thinkable reality. Any other 
reality than that which is thinkable can have 
no community with thought reality, but must 
be absolutely unknowable. It is not main- 
tained that there is no reality which is not 



STATEMENT AND DEFENCE OF IDEALISM 149 

thought by us, but only that the reality which 
we know is thought reality. This reality 
enters into our thought and forms its content, 
and as the content continually expands for us, 
so the reality continually expands. Reflecting 
upon this characteristic of knowledge, we get 
the notion of a completely determined reality, 
a reality which would be present to thought 
if thought were absolutely complete. Such a 
reality we do not possess, and it is therefore 
natural to say that there is a defect in the 
character of our thought which prevents us 
from grasping reality in its completeness. 
This explanation seems to me to rest upon 
the assumption that reality cannot be thought 
because thought deals only with abstractions. 
But, as I have maintained above, thought is 
never abstract; it contains within itself the 
whole wealth of reality, so far as reality is 
known to us. The defect is not in the char- 
acter of thought, as distinguished from feeling 
or intuition, but in the very nature of man as 
a being in whom knowledge is a never-ending 
process. What I contend for, then, is not that 
man has complete knowledge of reality, — a 



150 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

contention which is manifestly absurd, — but 
that reality in its completeness must be a think- 
able reality. Any other view seems to me to 
lead to the caput mortuum of the thing-in-itself, 
the reality which cannot be thought because it 
is unthinkable. When, therefore, Mr. Bradley 
says that it is an untenable position to maintain 
that " in reality there is nothing beyond what 
is made thought's object" (169), I agree with a 
caveat. That there is nothing which is not 
made " thought's object " is manifestly untrue, 
if the "thought" here spoken of is thought 
as it exists for man. But, if it is meant that 
there is in reality something which cannot be 
made the object of thought, because it is 
unthinkable, I do not see what sort of reality 
this can be; to me it seems to be merely a 
name for a metaphysical abstraction. Reality 
that cannot be thought is a sort of reality 
to which I find myself unable to attach 
any meaning, and until I find some one 
who can give a meaning to it, I refuse to 
admit its possibility. But I feel certain that 
such a person cannot be found, for the obvi- 
ous reason that if this supposititious reality 



STATEMENT AND DEFENCE OF IDEALISM 151 

had a meaning, it would no longer be un- 
thinkable. 

If these considerations are at all correct, the 
only reality which has any meaning for us is 
reality that is capable of being thought. And 
this reality is not for us stationary, but grows 
in content as thought, which is the faculty 
of unifying the distinguishable elements of 
reality, develops in the process by which 
those elements are more fully distinguished 
and unified. The reality which thus enters 
into and constitutes our thought is therefore 
not abstract but infinitely concrete. For, as 
we have seen, the process of thought is not 
the mere transition from one conception to 
another, but it is the internal development 
of conception, which is at the same time the 
development of the conceived world. The 
reality, therefore, which thus arises for us in 
the process of thought is a system, in which 
there is revealed an ever greater diversity 
brought back into an ever more complete 
unity. And this reality is the absolute, so 
far as the absolute enters into and consti- 
tutes our known world. To seek for the 



152 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

absolute beyond the thought reality, which 
alone exists for us, is to seek the living 
among the dead; if the absolute is not 
revealed to us in the reality that we know, 
it is for us nothing. 



CHAPTER VII 

IDEALISM IN RELATION TO AGNOSTICISM AND 
THE SPECIAL SCIENCES 

I. AGNOSTICISM 

In the preceding chapter an attempt has 
been made to explain and defend the gen- 
eral doctrine of Idealism, which affirms that 
the knowable world is identical with the 
world as it really is, and is a systematic or 
rational unity. This doctrine is of course 
diametrically opposed to Agnosticism. In a 
former work* it was maintained that Agnosti- 
cism is a self -contradictory theory, because in. 
affirming an absolute limit to human know- 
ledge, it assumes the knowledge of a realm of 
reality distinct from the realm of phenomena, 
and tacitly affirms that there are two kinds of 
intelligence, corresponding to these two realms. 
Two objections have been raised which it may 

* Comte, Mill, and Spencer, Chap. II. 
153 



154 THE CHR/STIAIV IDEAL OF LIFE 

be well to consider. It is objected, firstly, that 
my criticism applies only to a dogmatic affir- 
mation or denial of a noumenal reality ; and, 
secondly, that even if such a reality is ad- 
mitted, it is not a legitimate inference that its 
advocates are bound in consistency to assume 
two kinds of intelligence. 

(i) As to the first point, it must be an- 
swered, that a purely sceptical attitude is 
impossible. Such an attitude would mean, 
presumably, that he who assumes it refuses 
to say whether there is any reality other 
than that which is known by us : there may, 
or may not, be such a reality, but we are not 
in a position to give any answer either positive 
or negative. Now, it is hard to see how any 
one can affirm that we are unable to say 
whether that which we call reality is or is 
not reality, without basing his affirmation 
upon some limitation in the nature of our 
faculty of knowledge. Surely the inability 
on our part to determine whether we have 
any knowledge of reality or not, implies that 
our faculty of knowledge is by its very nature 
unable to distinguish between truth and false- 



IDEALISM IN RELATION TO AGNOSTICISM 155 

hood. But if we cannot distinguish between 
truth and falsehood, no proposition whatever 
can be held by us to be either true or false ; 
and therefore our affirmation that we cannot 
distinguish between truth or falsehood can- 
not be accepted as true. If it is not true, 
there is no affirmation whatever, but only 
the delusive appearance of affirmation; and 
to such a delusive appearance we can attach 
no meaning; it may be either the affirmation 
or denial of reality or some tertium quid ; it is, 
in fact, that logical monster, an affirmative- 
negative proposition. In short, if you make 
any judgment whatever which means any- 
thing, you have assumed the reality of your 
judgment, though not of what you affirm 
or deny in your judgment; and thus you 
have assumed that so far at least you have 
touched solid reality. A purely sceptical 
attitude is thus a contradiction in terms, — 
an affirmation which affirms nothing, or a 
denial which denies nothing. The most 
complete sceptic that ever lived assumed 
that his scepticism was real, and to that 
extent he was a dogmatist. 



156 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

(2) It is further maintained that even if the 
distinction between the phenomenal and the 
real is admitted, it does not follow that there 
must be two kinds of intelligence corre- 
sponding to these two realms. After what 
has been said, it must be obvious that this 
objection is unsound. For, if our intelligence 
is not capable of knowing reality, it must be 
because of an absolute limit in the character 
of our intelligence, and if that limit were re- 
moved reality, admitting it to exist, would be 
capable of being grasped by us. Now, the 
dogmatic phenomenalist, and even, as has 
been shown, the so-called sceptical phenome- 
nalist, assumes that there is reality. No 
western thinker, so far as I know, has had 
the courage to affirm that there is no reality 
whatever: that sublime height has been 
reached only in the east. Now, if there is 
reality at all, it must be comprehensible by 
some intelligence. It may be said that there 
is no such intelligence, or at least that we 
cannot know that there is such an intelli- 
gence. But surely we are entitled to de- 
mand that no affirmation should be made 



IDEALISM IN RELATION TO AGNOSTICISM 157 

which is meaningless. The phenomenalist, 
then, admits that there is reality, and in so 
doing he assumes that he is saying some- 
thing which has a meaning for himself, and 
for others who hear or read what he says. 
Now what is a reality which is not a real- 
ity for some intelligence ? Make any predi- 
cation you like about it, and you will find 
that, if you mean anything at all, you mean 
that it is present to an intelligence. If you 
refuse to make any predication about it, it 
is not reality but pure nothingness. Hence 
you cannot say: "There is reality,'' without 
assuming that reality has a meaning, and to 
say that it has a meaning is to say that it is 
relative to some intelligence. Now the phe- 
nomenalist affirms that reality is not the 
object of his intelligence, and therefore it 
must be the object of some other intelli- 
gence, or it is nothing at all. And this other 
intelligence cannot involve an absolute limit, 
as our intelligence is assumed to do, because 
if it did it would not grasp reality but only 
appearance ; in other words, the phenomenalist 
in affirming the absolute limitation of his own 



158 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

intelligence has tacitly assumed an intelli- 
gence free from limits. I was therefore right 
in saying that from the doctrine of the rela- 
tivity of knowledge it is a legitimate infer- 
ence that there are two kinds of intelligence, 
one absolutely limited and the other abso- 
lutely unlimited. The absurdity of this doc- 
trine I shall not again insist upon: I shall 
only repeat that an intelligence which is 
absolutely limited would never know that it 
was absolutely limited, since in that case it 
would be beyond the assumed limits. 

Now if it is admitted that there is a ra- 
tional or intelligible system of things, it is 
obvious that with this single system all the 
sciences must deal. Reality is one, and to 
suppose it split up into bits by the concen- 
tration of attention upon one phase of it, is 
to be the victim of an abstraction. When in 
geometry we define a point or line, we are 
not dealing with a " mere idea/' but with a 
fixed relation holding for every subject for 
whom there is any reality whatever. Simi- 
larly, all the judgments of geometry imply 
that there are unchanging relations in the 



IDEALISM IN RELATION TO AGNOSTICISM 159 

one system of reality which alone is or can 
be known, and these unchanging relations 
constitute the objectivity of that system, so 
far as it comes within the view of geometry. 
This does not mean that there is a world 
constituted of nothing but geometrical rela- 
tions, but it does mean that a world from 
which all geometrical relations are eliminated 
is unthinkable. If geometrical relations are 
not determinations of the real world, all the 
sciences of nature are made impossible, and, 
as a consequence, the whole of the philo- 
sophical sciences as well. What is said of 
spatial relations, of course, holds good also of 
temporal relations. And when we pass from 
the mathematical determination of reality 
to the dynamical — from space and time to 
matter and motion — the same principle of 
explanation still applies. For dynamical re- 
lations are real aspects of the one system 
of reality, while yet they do not exhaust its 
nature. It is as great a mistake to deny 
that those relations are determinations of the 
absolute as to affirm that in them we have 
reached an exhaustive definition of it. A 



l6o THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

world of matter and motion is real in the 
same sense that a world of space or a world 
of time is real ; without dynamical relations 
there could be no reality whatever, but a 
reality consisting of these relations alone — a 
world of pure matter and motion — is as im- 
possible as a world of pure space or pure 
time. They are real, unchangeable aspects of 
existence, but they are no more than aspects. 
For, though there would be no real world 
were the relations or laws of dynamics not 
unchangeable, there are other aspects of real- 
ity which still further define existence. Cer- 
tain of these, aspects are brought to light by 
physics, chemistry, and biology. Here again 
we may say that what the sciences affirm 
they affirm of the absolute, but we cannot 
say that now at last we have reached the 
ultimate or complete determination of it. All 
the sciences, from mathematics to biology 
inclusive, are abstract in this sense, that 
there are other aspects of reality which they 
presuppose. These new aspects of the one 
single system of reality form the subject- 
matter of the philosophical sciences, which 



IDEALISM IN RELATION TO MATHEMATICS i6l 

again presuppose logic or metaphysic as 
the science which deals directly with the in- 
terrelation of all the principles upon which 
the other sciences are based. 



II. MATHEMATICS 

The view which has just been indicated 
implies that mathematics is a science, i.e. 
contains propositions which are true or hold 
of reality. These propositions are, as I be- 
lieve, true formulations of fundamental condi- 
tions or relations by which the real world is 
characterised, though they are certainly not 
a formulation of all those conditions. What 
is held is not that mathematics formulates 
" the intellectual conditions of sensible real- 
ity," if this means that there is an absolute 
separation between " sensible reality " and an- 
other reality which may be defined as non- 
sensible. There are not two realities, but 
only one. What is called " sensible reality " 
is either the fiction of a world supposed to 
be given in immediate sensation, or it is a 
term for certain aspects of the one reality, 

M 



1 62 THE CHRISTIAX IDEAL OF LIFE 

the only reality there is. To speak of >% sen- 
sible reality M as contrasted with non-sensible 
or supersensible reality is to fall back into 
that untenable phenomenalism, the contradic- 
tory character of which has already been main- 
tained. Mathematics, then, concentrates its 
attention upon certain very simple conditions 
or relations of the one and only reality, and, 
as I believe, is successful in formulating their 
nature. 

It may be objected, however, that this view 
of mathematics takes no account of the re- 
cent doctrine that Euclidean geometry merely 
states the conditions of our space of three 
dimensions. Xow it might fairly be answered 
that it is incumbent upon the advocates of 
imaginary geometry to reconcile their doctrine 
with any tenable theory of knowledge. Does 
their hypothetical space of four or more di- 
mensions contradict our space of three dimen- 
sions ? If it does, they deny the principle 
of contradiction, contradict themselves, and 
can prove neither the reality of a space of 
four nor a space of three dimensions, since 
they cannot prove the reality of any space 






IDEALISM IN RELATION TO MATHEMATICS 163 

whatever, or of anything else. It seems ad- 
visable, however, to deal more directly with 
the question. The discussion will necessarily 
be brief, but I shall try to indicate the main 
points. Let me repeat that I do not for a 
moment deny the value of imaginary geome- 
try as a system of mathematical symbols. I 
should as soon think of denying the value 
of the Cartesian co-ordinates. What I deny 
is the philosophical doctrine based upon the 
symbolic constructions of mathematics, — the 
doctrine that a space of four or more dimen- 
sions is a possible reality. I must also warn 
the reader that I cannot deal with the mutu- 
ally discrepant philosophical views of those 
who argue for the phenomenality of our space 
of three dimensions. I shall further limit my- 
self mainly to Riemann and Helmholtz. I may 
mention, however, that I find the conclusions 
which I reached several years ago endorsed 
by such eminent logicians as Sigwart and 
Wundt, not to speak of Lotze. 

(1) I find Riemann, then, arguing in this 
way : Space is a logical species of which the 
logical genus is extended magnitude or mill- 



164 THE CHRISTIAN* IDEAL OF LIFE 

tiplicity (Mannigfaltigkeit) ; hence, though our 
space is the only one of which we have actual 
experience, it is not the only possible space. 
If it is objected that Riemann is "antiquated," 
let me cite Bruno Erdmann. I have not read 
Erdmann's treatise, having ceased to take any 
interest in the question after my study of 
Riemann and Helmholtz, but I quote the state- 
ment of his view from Wundt's Logik (I. 440). 
His view is, then, that " modern geometry has 
been able to find a more general conception, 
under which space may be subsumed as a 
particular species, and from which therefore 
by the introduction of determinate conditions 
the fundamental properties of space may be 
developed analytically." Now I have no hesi- 
tation in saying that this supposed sub- 
sumption of space under a logical genus is a 
blunder, which the best modern logicians have 
clearly exposed. The whole idea of determin- 
ing the real relations of things by the forma- 
tion of an ascending series of abstractions 
is utterly untenable, resting as it does upon 
the mediaeval idea of logic as a purely formal 
science. The real world as it exists for our 



IDEALISM IN RELATION TO MATHEMATICS 165 

conceptual thought is not obtained by abstrac- 
tion from full-formed individuals given in per- 
ception, but by a concrete process in which 
the first immediate judgments of perception 
are transformed by the comprehension of the 
fundamental relations, implied in those judg- 
ments, and brought to light in the complex 
process in which knowledge is developed. To 
run up and down a logical " Porphyry's tree " 
is a travesty of the process of thought, which 
corresponds to nothing " in heaven above, or 
the earth beneath, or the waters under the 
earth." But, even if we grant that the subsump- 
tion of logical species under a genus is a valid 
process, it would not prove that our space is 
only one of several possible species of space. 
For the whole account of the formation of logi- 
cal species rests upon the presupposition that 
the ultimate datum from which we start is the 
individual. Now the individual in this case 
is our three-dimensional space, and hence we 
cannot reason from the general conception of 
extended magnitude to the possible reality of 
several species of space. We can get nothing 
out of the conception of extended magnitude 



1 66 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

but what we have put into it ; hence, when we 
descend the logical tree which we have pre- 
viously ascended, we shall find at the end just 
what we had at the beginning, and what we 
had at the beginning was an individual space 
of three dimensions. Riemann so far admits 
this as to say that our space of three dimen- 
sions rests upon " experience," but he still 
supposes that conception is wider than " ex- 
perience," and hence that there is nothing to 
hinder us from supposing a space of four or 
more dimensions. There is, of course, noth- 
ing to hinder us from thinking of a space of 
four or more dimensions, but the possible 
reality of such a space cannot be deduced 
from the abstract conception of extended mag- 
nitude. That conception is limited by what 
is already contained under it, and there is 
only one space contained under it, not several 
species of space. I hold, then, that in rea- 
soning from logical genus to logical species, 
Riemann has fallen into the logical mistake of 
supposing that possible reality can be deter- 
mined by logical possibility. In support of 
what I have said let me quote a few sentences 



IDEALISM IN RELATION TO MATHEMATICS 167 

from Wundt. Referring to Erdmann, he says : 
" This view must at least be so far corrected, 
that the question cannot be in regard to a 
relation of genus and species in the ordinary 
logical sense. If a genus is to be formed, 
several species must be given which possess 
certain common marks. But in this case only 
one space is given to our perception." And 
then he goes on to point out that " we can 
never possess an actual image of spaces differ- 
ent from ours." " An opposite view," he con- 
tinues, " seems to be maintained by some 
mathematicians, who hold that we can make a 
sensible picture of spaces of another kind, as 
e.g. a space which consists merely of a plane 
or of a spherical or pseudo-spherical surface." # 
This brings us to what I regard as another 
fallacy of those who maintain the possible 
reality of a space other than ours. 

(2) Helmholtz seeks to commend his view 
that a space other than ours can not only be 
thought but presented to the imagination, by 
the fiction of beings living in a plane, or 
a sphere, and limited in their consciousness to 

* Wundt's Logik: I. 440-1. 



1 68 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

the plane or the sphere. The whole supposi- 
tion seems to me absurd and self-contradictory. 
There is no difficulty whatever in thinking of 
beings limited to a plane or sphere; for such 
beings are to all intents and purposes identical 
with the plane or sphere ; but what we cannot 
do is to think of their consciousness as super- 
ficial or spherical. A superficial or spherical 
consciousness has no meaning whatever that I 
can discover. Now, if our supposititious beings 
have not a superficial or spherical conscious- 
ness, we must suppose that the plane or the 
sphere is an object which they can think and 
reason about. But, if they have before their 
consciousness only a plane or a sphere, they 
w r ill not have any geometry such as we pos- 
sess, because a plane is the boundary of a 
solid, and a curve is relative to a tangent. 
Such beings would therefore have no geome- 
try whatever. This seems obvious if we 
carry out Helmholtz's suggestion, and suppose 
beings limited to a point. Will any one affirm 
that a point has any meaning except as the 
boundary of a line ? In short, a plane or sphere 
is intelligible only because it is a figure in our 



IDEALISM IN RELATION TO MATHEMATICS 169 

three-dimensional space. To reason from the 
curvature of a plane or sphere to the curvature 
of space seems to me a palpable fallacy. Space 
has no curvature, though figures in space have. 
Let me again support my view by a quotation 
from Wundt. " When we deal with the geome- 
try of the plane," says Wundt, u our spatial idea 
is no other than in the geometry of space ; we 
merely leave out of consideration all spatial 
relations except the plane ; we do the same 
in the investigation of the geometrical proper- 
ties of spherical or pseudo-spherical surfaces. 
Those relations of space from which we thus 
abstract have no existence apart from our 
idea; on the contrary, we require our com- 
plete space-perception, not only for the idea 
of a curved surface, but even for the idea of 
a surface or a line, for we can no more im- 
agine the surface than the line except as in 
space: we imagine both not as independent 
spaces, but as figures in space." * 

(3) It is supposed that because functions of 
magnitude can be converted into geometrical 
relations of a thinkable space, there may be 

* Ibid. I. 441. 



170 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

beings who enjoy the consciousness of a space 
of n dimensions. Surely this is an untenable 
inference. We can think of systems in which 
four, five, or any number of elements are re- 
quired, instead of the three elements which 
space demands for the determination of the 
position of a point. But, in order to give a 
geometrical meaning to analytical operations, 
we have to refer to our space of three dimen- 
sions. " It is self-evident," says Wundt, "that 
mathematical speculations, which infer that our 
space must be related to a four-dimensional 
magnitude in the same way as the surface is 
related to our space, cannot of themselves be 
the basis for the imaginability of a space of 
four or more dimensions. This question 
stands upon precisely the same level as that 
with which the older ontology occupied itself, 
viz. whether the actual world is or is not the 
best of all possible worlds." * I will conclude 
with a passage from Sigwart. "The result of 
these enquiries," says Sigwart, " is not that it 
is left to experience to decide whether we 
are to assume the plane space of Euclid, or a 
* ibid. i. 443. 



IDEALISM IN RELATION TO THE SCIENCES 171 

space which is in some way curved ; but only 
that from the purely logical standpoint of 
analysis the quantitative relations of space 
are not to be derived as the necessary form 
of a manifold which varies in three directions, 
but that on the contrary they are actual, be- 
cause based upon an unanalysable necessity of 
our space-perception, which is essentially dif- 
ferent from any law which can be expressed 
in numbers and numerical relations. They 
open up no possibility of extending our space- 
perception, or of representing a non-Euclidian 
geometry not merely in analytical formulae, 
but also for actual perception; we remain sub- 
ject to those laws of space according to which 
we first think of it, and it is as certain that 
Euclid will remain unrefuted in geometry, as 
it is that Aristotle in his principle of contradic- 
tion has outlived the Hegelian logic." * 

III. THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES 

I conclude, then, that there is nothing in 
the speculations of " pangeometry " to support 

* Sigwart's Logic. English tr., II. 566. 



172 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

the view of phenomenalists either that our 
consciousness has certain forms of perception 
peculiar to itself, as Helmholtz maintains, or 
as others hold that there may be an external 
world which lies in a space of four or more 
dimensions. To set forth all the objections 
which beset these views would be to write a 
whole system of philosophy, but I hope I 
have at least succeeded in indicating some 
of them. The world of the mathematician is, 
however, very far from being reality in its 
completeness; it exists only as the construc- 
tion of the mathematician, though that con- 
struction rests upon unchangeable relations 
or conditions of the one reality which alone 
exists. Hence, when we pass to the physical 
sciences we have made a considerable advance 
in the determination of those relations or con- 
ditions. There are, however, two fundamen- 
tal mistakes which we must here seek to 
avoid: the mistake of supposing that science 
merely " describes " the world of sensible per- 
ception, as Kirchhoff seems to say, and the 
mistake of imagining that the laws of science 
are more than an abstract or partial determi- 






IDEALISM IN RELATION TO THE SCIENCES 173 

nation of reality. The theory of knowledge 
which many scientific men advance, when they 
leave their proper task and assume the role 
of the logician, is usually a curious mixture 
of these opposite errors. 

Our first view of the world naturally is that 
things lie before us in perception, and that, 
in order to know them, we must take them as 
they present themselves, carefully excluding 
all preconceptions, and accurately observing 
their qualities and determining the quantity 
of each quality. Without observation of this 
kind there can be no science of nature, but 
it can hardly be said yet to be science ; or, 
at least, it can be called science only when 
the observer is guided in his selection of 
facts by ideas of relation. What underlies 
scientific observation is a faith in the pres- 
ence in nature of conditions or relations 
which remain permanent under all the 
changes of particulars. It must be observed, 
therefore, that science transforms the ordi- 
nary view of the world by penetrating to 
those permanent conditions or relations which 
are not obvious to perception, but are only 



174 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

brought to light by the persistent endeavour 
to find the identical in the different. The 
reality which science discovers is in one way 
an ideal world, a world which exists only as 
a construction of the scientific intellect, but 
it is at the same time a much truer appre- 
hension of reality than that ordinary view 
of things from which science is developed, 
though it may be said that the ordinary view 
contains implicitly more than science does 
justice to. Thus the physicist and chemist 
virtually set aside all the sensible relations 
of things, — not because these fall outside of 
the real world, but because they do not 
come within the scope of their science, — 
leaving them to be dealt with by the more 
concrete sciences of physiology and psy- 
chology. If, therefore, we fail to observe the 
transformation which science effects in our 
ordinary view of the world, we shall fall into 
the mistake of supposing that it is merely a 
" description " of sensible objects, and if we 
insist upon the reality of the abstract world 
of relations upon which science, for its own 
purposes, concentrates attention, we shall fall 



IDEALISM IN RELATION TO THE SCIENCES 175 

into the opposite mistake of hypostatising 
this abstract world, and identifying it with 
the real world in its completeness. These 
two defects are closely related to each other ; 
for it is just because we overlook the partial 
or abstract character of the laws of science 
that we convert relations into vague and 
shadowy things ; and it is because we do not 
see that science adopts a negative attitude 
towards immediate perception that we suppose 
it to leave sensible reality as it was before sci- 
entific insight has broken it up, and are led 
to regard laws of nature as a refined tran- 
script of the sensible, instead of being, what 
they are, a purely conceptual world of fixed 
conditions and relations, implied no doubt in 
the world of ordinary observation, but not 
brought into clear consciousness and made 
an object of direct consideration. Thus 
Comte tells us that science confines itself to 
the investigation of the laws of the resem- 
blance, coexistence, and succession of phe- 
nomena, and he assumes that these laws are 
simply the generalised restatement or descrip- 
tion of the phenomena themselves. But a 



176 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

law is something more than a generalised re- 
statement or description of phenomena, if by 
" phenomena " we mean the objects of ordinary 
observation. For a law is contrasted with 
phenomena as the permanent relation in the 
changing particular, as that which is identical 
in spite of all differences, as the principle by 
reference to which particulars are seen to be 
more than mere phenomena or transitory 
phases of reality. Were it not possible to 
penetrate to such permanent, identical, or 
unchanging relations, we should have no 
science of nature. It is nothing to the 
point that no law is final, for the develop- 
ment of science, like all other developments, 
consists in an ever fuller comprehension of 
fix^d relations, or what are usually called 
" uniformities,'' a development which does not 
simply set aside the relations already discov- 
ered, but combines them in a higher syn- 
thesis ; indeed, if this were not the case, 
science would at every fresh advance throw 
down all that it had laboriously built up 
and start de novo. 

Now, if we keep in mind these two aspects 



IDEALISM IN RELATION- TO THE SCIENCES 177 

of a scientific law, — that it is, on the one hand, 
\ the revelation of a principle which is estab- 
\ lished only by a necessary but in a sense an 
artificial simplification of reality, and that this 
principle is, after all, only a permanent rela- 
tion of the changing, — we shall, I think, be 
led to see that a law of nature, as it is not a 
" description " of phenomena, so it is not a 
description of " uniformities." A "uniformity," 
if we are to give the word anything like its 
ordinary meaning, is naturally regarded as a 
customary or frequent repetition of a given 
resemblance, sequence, or coexistence; and it 
is in this sense that Mill and many scientific 
men who make an incursion into the field of 
logic are disposed to interpret a law. It was 
in contrast to this doctrine that I ventured to 
challenge Mills view of induction as based 
upon " resemblance," instead of " identity." * 
The "identity," of course, as any one who 
reads what I have said with ordinary care will 
see, is not that of a changeless " substance " or 
"thing," — I do not admit the reality of such 
fictions at all, — but of a relation. No two 

* Comte, Mill, and Spencer, pp. 92-3. 
N 



178 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

individuals are alike; but in all their differ- 
ences they may agree in a certain feature, and 
this agreement is the basis of induction. 

Now, when we ask what bearing this view 
of a law of nature has upon the question of 
the relativity of knowledge, it is no answer to 
say that science is entirely neutral. In one 
way that is a bare tautology. Science as such 
is not a theory of knowledge ; and, of course, 
having no theory of knowledge, it does not tell 
us what the ultimate nature of reality is ; but 
the question is whether the view of reality, 
which in the pursuit of his special object the 
scientific man naturally adopts, can be re- 
garded as ultimate. The attempt to answer 
this question leads us into the region of phi- 
losophy, and compels us to ask what is the 
general view of reality upon which science is 
based ; and the answer, as we may be certain, 
cannot fail to be coloured by the general the- 
ory of knowledge which commends itself to 
those who seek to answer the question. A 
phenomenalist theory of knowledge will find 
support in science for its doctrine, because it 
will interpret scientific conclusions from that 



IDEALISM IN RELATION TO THE SCIENCES 179 

point of view, and so in other cases. I have 
tried to explain why I cannot accept the phe~ 
nomenalist interpretation. I cannot accept it, 
because, as it seems to me, it does not do jus- 
tice to the real advance beyond ordinary obser- 
vation which science makes, and because it 
does not take due note of the abstract or par- 
tial character of the scientific view of reality. 
On this last point I should like to say a word 
or two. 

We are too apt to talk glibly of "laws of 
nature " or " uniformities of nature," not seeing 
that two discrepant views of reality are con- 
cealed beneath this ambiguous phraseology. 
Is " nature " simply a term for an aggregate of 
phenomena? or is it a real unity or organic 
system ? Mill tells us that we cannot properly 
speak of the " uniformity " of nature, but only 
of " uniformities" of nature. Now, waiving the 
objection I have already made that science 
deals with identities and not with uniformities, 
and interpreting the term " uniformity " in its 
higher sense, it is obvious that to deny any 
identity or unity in nature is to deny that 
reality is an organic system. But this is the 



180 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

same as saying that all we can know of reality 
is that in point of fact we find certain relations 
which, so far as our experience goes, have not 
changed, but which, for aught we can show, 
might change at any moment. Thus, under 
the denial of the uniformity or unity of nature, 
Mill and others assume the phenomenalist 
view of knowable reality ; and when they are 
asked to substantiate their assumption, they 
fall back upon a sensationalist theory of 
knowledge, and a metaphysical theory of the 
absolute limitation of our knowledge to phe- 
nomena. To one who rejects the sensation- 
alist epistemology and is convinced of the 
self-contradictory character of the phenome- 
nalist metaphysic, the denial of the systematic 
unity of the real seems a denial of all know- 
ledge and of all reality. I content myself with 
pointing out this result of the ordinary view 
of laws of nature as implying nothing but 
observed uniformities, having already dwelt 
sufficiently upon what I regard as the defects 
of sensationalism and phenomenalism. To me 
it seems to be one of the gifts which a true 
philosophy conveys, to bring to light that 



IDEALISM IN RELATION TO BIOLOGY 181 

organic unity of nature which is implicit in 
science. For " nature " has no meaning apart 
from a unifying intelligence, and to deny the 
unity of nature is to deny the unity of intelli- 
gence and to make all knowledge impossible. 
I admit, however, or rather contend, that the 
organic unity of reality lies beyond the horizon 
of the specialist in physics, and even in chem- 
istry ; but the biologist, from the character of 
the objects with which he deals, is almost inva- 
riably more readily disposed to hold that the 
real world is an organic unity. In proof of 
this it is enough to refer to Darwin himself, 
whose whole doctrine is inspired by the idea 
of such a unity, though he fails to give a 
philosophical formulation of it; and to the 
recent developments of biology, which have 
been more and more in this direction. 

IV. BIOLOGY 

The doctrine of natural selection, while it 
compels us to abandon the external or me- 
chanical idea of teleology associated with the 
name of Paley, is incompetent to explain 



1 82 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

knowledge or morality. To this view it has 
been objected that the doctrine of evolution, 
as held by Darwin and many of his followers, 
cannot be identified with the doctrine of 
natural selection, and that I have therefore 
confused true Darwinism with the views of 
Wallace and Weismann. This objection 
does not seem to me to affect in any way 
the point which I sought to establish. My 
aim was to show that, without assuming any- 
thing but what is admitted by all biologists, 
a certain philosophical conclusion, not con- 
templated or even denied by certain biolo- 
gists, must yet be reached. That conclusion 
was that an immanent teleology may be legiti- 
mately deduced from the doctrine of natural 
selection. It was not necessary for my pur- 
pose to embroil myself in the questions at 
issue between Wallace, Weismann, and others, 
while by doing so I should have given occa- 
sion for the retort that teleology has nothing 
to do with the biological doctrine of evolu- 
tionary descent. That this is no fanciful dan- 
ger may be shown by a single extract from 
Huxley's account of the reception of the 



IDEALISM IN RELATION TO BIOLOGY 183 

Origin of Species in Darwin's Life and 
Letters. " Having got rid," says Huxley, "of 
the belief in chance and the disbelief in de- 
sign, as in no seitse appurtenances of evolution, 
the third libel upon that doctrine, that it is 
anti-theistic, might perhaps be left to shift for 
itself. . . . The doctrine of evolution does 
not even come into contact with theism, con- 
sidered as a philosophical doctrine/' # To 
this view I entirely assent ; but, as it seems to 
me, we may, accepting the scientific doctrine 
of evolutionary descent, go on to base upon it 
a philosophical argument in favour of a teleo- 
logical view of the world. It may be said, 
however, that it is illegitimate to speak of 
Darwinism as synonymous with the doctrine 
of natural selection. And no doubt it is 
true that, in the wider sense of the term, the 
biological doctrine of evolution, as held by 
Darwin, admitted other factors than natural 
selection; but it will be admitted that the 
great achievement of Darwin was the destruc- 
tion of the old rigid separation of species by 
the theory of natural selection. This was all 

* Darwin's Life and Letters : Am. ed., I. 555-6. 



1 84 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

that I contended, and all that my argument 
required me to deal with. In taking this 
view I might have supported myself by the 
authority of Huxley. In the essay already 
quoted, that eminent biologist says : " The 
suggestion that new species may result from 
the selective action of external conditions 
upon the variations from their specific type 
which individuals present ... is the central 
idea of the Origin of Species and contains 
the quintessence of Darwinism!' # And again, 
a few pages further on: " Whatever may be 
the ultimate fate of the particular theory put 
forth by Darwin [the "particular theory," as 
the context shows, being natural selection], I 
venture to affirm that, so far as my know- 
ledge goes, all the ingenuity and all the learn- 
ing of hostile critics has not enabled them 
to adduce a solitary fact, of which it can be 
said this is irreconcilable with the Darwinian 
theory."! Here Huxley tells us that natural 
selection is " the quintessence of Darwinism/' 
and that opponents have not adduced " a soli- 
tary fact, of which it can be said this is irrecon- 

* Ibid. I. 548-9. f Ibid. I. 553. 



IDEALISM IN RELATION TO BIOLOGY 185 

cilable with the Darwinian theory," meaning 
the theory of natural selection. Surely what 
Huxley here means is that what was dis- 
tinctive of Darwin was the doctrine of natural 
selection. It seems unnecessary to dwell fur- 
ther upon this point, but it may be worth 
while, for other reasons, to cite a few of 
Darwin's own expressions. To begin with, 
what did Darwin call his first great book ? 
He called it The Origin of Species by Meci7ts 
of Natural Selection. In the autobiography 
he says : " The old argument from design 
in nature, as given by Paley, which formerly 
seemed to me so conclusive, fails, now that 
the law of natural selection has been discovered. 
. . . There seems to be no more design 
in the variability of organic beings, and in 
the action of natural selection, than in the 
course which the wind blows." # This pas- 
sage leaves no doubt whatever that in Dar- 
win's own mind his theory was incompatible 
with teleology. On another occasion Dar- 
win writes: "It is not that designed varia- 
tion makes, as it seems to me, my deity 

* Ibid. I. 278-9. 



1 86 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

1 natural selection ' superfluous, but from seeing 
what an enormous field of undesigned varia- 
bility there is ready for natural selection to 
appropriate." Now I have no desire to nar- 
row Darwin's theory more than he narrowed 
it himself. I know that Darwin, with his large 
candour and what may be called his uncon- 
scious idealism, follows the facts wherever they 
lead him, and suggests modifications of his 
doctrine which, as he says on one occasion, 
" lessen the glory of natural selection " ; but I 
think no one can deny that he always and 
consistently rejected teleology, and rejected it 
mainly " now that the law of natural selection 
has been discovered." Now, my argument 
was, rightly or wrongly, that the law of natural 
selection itself, when we see all its philosophi- 
cal — not its scientific — implications, compels 
us to affirm an immanent teleology, and that 
it is from not taking note of these implications 
that Darwin himself and many of his followers 
suppose that knowledge and morality may be 
explained by the method of science. It there- 
fore seems to me that science does not estab- 
lish teleology, but that a comprehensive view 



IDEALISM IN RELATION TO BIOLOGY \%j 

of living beings, and much more of man, does 
establish teleology. But, after all, it is mainly 
a question of definition whether we call a 
theory scientific or philosophical ; and I am 
quite contented to rest my case on the broad 
view that Darwin and many of his followers 
are wrong in denying teleology, though they 
are perfectly right in denying that mechanical 
form of teleology which is associated with the 
name of Paley. 

It is important to observe that a teleological 
view of the world does not exclude but pre- 
supposes the law of natural causation. We 
must therefore be careful to avoid regarding 
" purpose " as a sort of dens ex machma, which 
is to be invoked when the ordinary scientific 
explanation has not yet been discovered. Such 
a conception of " purpose " in nature seems to 
me a survival of the obsolete idea of external 
teleology, from which the doctrine of develop- 
ment has helped to free us. I have no belief 
in a teleology which does not presuppose the 
inviolability of the natural law of causation. 
If a break could be found in that law, we 
should have to fall back upon the idea that 



1 88 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

there is no system of nature, but merely a par- 
tial and imperfect arrangement of parts. The 
teleology which is here maintained is based 
upon the recognition of a fixed order in nature. 
What is held is, that living beings by their 
very nature contain in them a principle of 
unity which is realised within the inviolable 
system of natural law. 

The theory of natural selection assumes, 
firstly, that the laws of nature are inviolable. 
This is at bottom another way of saying that, 
when we come to the study of nature, we pre- 
suppose that it is a system of facts, so perfect 
that there is no break or flaw in it. Hence 
living beings, as well as inorganic things, are 
within this system, and there can be no such 
dissolution of continuity as that which is sug- 
gested by the view of purpose as external or 
mechanical. Secondly, natural selection as- 
sumes that in each living being there is a 
tendency or impulse to maintain itself and to 
continue the species. In saying that the doc- 
trine of natural selection rests on this assump- 
tion, it is not meant that the biologist need be 
aware of it, or that he employs it in his specific 




IDEALISM IN RELATION TO BIOLOGY 189 

enquiries. The specialist is hardly ever aware 
of the preconceptions from which he starts. 
What is maintained is, that reflection upon 
the theory of natural selection compels us to 
take this view. It has been said that the 
impulse to self-maintenance is " something 
wholly conditioned upon and resident within 
the material nature of the organism." What 
is to be understood by the " material nature of 
the organism " ? Is it meant that the craving 
for food, for example, can be attributed to " the 
material nature of the organism"? If so, that 
impulse must be capable of being expressed in 
terms of matter and motion. This seems to 
me a mere confusion of thought, resting upon 
a physical metaphor which conceals the char- 
acteristic fact that sensibility does not belong 
to the " material nature of the organism," but 
is the differentia of a certain class of living 
beings. 

Thirdly, if there were no adaptation what- 
ever between organisms and their environ- 
ment, it would be impossible for them to 
exist at all. It is objected that there is 
also harmony between " a piece of ice and 



190 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

the water in which it floats." No doubt ; but 
the kind of harmony to which I refer, as is 
implied by the two preceding characteristics, 
is one which exists only in a being which 
is internally purposive, and that cannot be 
said of the piece of ice. It is no doubt true 
that when we have discovered that living 
beings are purposive, we can no longer speak 
of nature as if it were merely a mechanical 
system ; but, as Kant points out, it is living 
beings which first clearly suggest to us that 
nature is purposive. And if it is true, as I 
have maintained, that we cannot differentiate 
living from non-living beings without apply- 
ing the idea of purpose, we are entitled to 
say that reality as a whole must be inter- 
preted from the new point of view of an 
immanent teleology. It is only by an arti- 
ficial truncation of reality, such as is a neces- 
sary device in the pursuit of the physical 
sciences, that we are led to suppose that 
nature is merely a mechanical system. The 
peculiar phenomena of living beings compel 
us to revise our first inadequate view, and to 
say that real existence is not merely a me- 



IDEALISM IN RELATION TO BIOLOGY 191 

chanical but a teleological system. Having 
gone so far, we can hardly refuse to take 
the last step, and admit that the existence 
of self-conscious beings again compels us to 
revise our view of reality, and to admit that 
the only completely satisfactory explanation 
of it is that which refers the world to a self- 
conscious, rational, and spiritual principle. # 

* Though I still think that teleology may be established simply 
from the principle of natural selection, I have, in this second edition, 
sought to show that, if we accept the view of those biologists who hold 
that organic evolution involves other factors, — a view with which I 
agree, so far as a layman in science has any right to an opinion, — the 
argument receives additional strength. See Chapter IX. 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE FAILURE OF MATERIALISM 

In the last chapter we have been mainly 
occupied in the consideration of certain inad- 
equate conceptions of reality which are the 
natural result of a limited view of the world. 
Success in the pursuit of any one of the 
special sciences demands intense concentra- 
tion of energy, and almost inevitably leads 
those engaged in it to overlook other aspects 
of reality without which a consistent view of 
the world as a whole is impossible. In the 
present chapter it is proposed to consider 
what is really a metaphysical doctrine, though 
it is apt to claim for itself the combined au- 
thority of all the sciences. This doctrine, to 
which the general name of Materialism may 
be given, is now, as it always has been, con- 
nected with the belief in the existence and 

indestructibility of certain ultimate particles 

192 



THE FAILURE OF MATERIALISM 1 93 

or atoms. It maintains, in the words of 
Haeckel, that " all natural phenomena without 
exception, from the motion of the celestial 
bodies and the fall of the rolling stone up to 
the growth of the plant and the conscious- 
ness of man, are subject to the same great 
law of causation, being ultimately reducible 
to atomic mechanics." # It is obvious that 
such a theory as this, when pressed to its 
logical consequences, is incompatible with the 
conception of any reality which cannot be 
resolved into ultimate atoms and the forces 
which operate between them, and is therefore 
diametrically opposed to the idealistic view, 
that the world is the expression of self-con- 
scious reason. 

The conception that there are indivisible 
and indestructible atoms, and that all the 
changes which take place in the world are 
ultimately reducible to the transposition of 
these atoms, seems to me merely a survival 
of our first uncritical interpretation of experi- 
ence. It is supposed that there exist an in- 
finite number of particular things, lying side 

* Haeckel, Freie Wissenschaft und freie Lehre, pp. 9, 10. 



194 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

by side in space, each of which has an inde- 
pendent existence and a peculiar nature which 
is inseparable from it. Those things no doubt 
enter into relations with one another, and are 
therefore subject to change ; but these relations 
and changes do not affect their real nature. 
Now science, in its efforts to determine the 
essential properties of things, soon discovers 
that it must abstract from the immediate 
sensible properties which they seem to pos- 
sess, and concentrate its attention upon those 
fixed relations between things, which are con- 
stant in all their changes, and can be ex- 
pressed in precise mathematical formulae. If 
the new conception of reality demanded by 
this changed point of view were frankly ac- 
cepted, the assumption of the independent 
existence and nature of particular things 
would be discarded, and the world would 
now be regarded as a system of mutually re- 
lated elements, none of which has any reality 
apart from the rest. But there are two rea- 
sons why this conclusion is received with 
hesitation. In the first place, it is instinc- 
tively felt that the reality of a thing can- 



THE FAILURE OF MATERIALISM 1 95 

not be resolved entirely into its relations to 
other things : that, in Mr. Balfour's words, 
" it is hard to see how it is possible to con- 
ceive a universe in which nothing is to be 
permitted for the relations to subsist between." 
The truth lying at the basis of this conviction, 
as I have already tried to show, is, that the 
world must be conceived of as an individual 
system, in which the distinguishable elements 
do indeed possess reality, but not separate 
and independent existence. But this truth is 
apt to be misinterpreted to mean that each 
element has a residuum of reality after all its 
relations to other things have been set aside. 
Hence, secondly, it comes to be supposed that 
there are real things, which, though they are 
destitute of all sensible qualities, are yet sep- 
arate and independent, and possess an abso- 
lutely unchanging nature. Finding that all 
sensible objects are capable of indefinite divis- 
ion and transformation, the scientific man is 
apt to assume that this division and transfor- 
mation must stop somewhere, and hence that 
bodies are composed of indivisible and un- 
changeable atoms. These, then, are the real 



ig6 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

or substantial things. The relations into 
which they enter in their intercourse with 
one another do not affect the atoms them- 
selves. Atomism thus retains the original 
assumption of common sense, that there are 
real individual things which are unaffected 
by the accidental or unessential changes 
which they undergo, merely substituting in- 
visible atoms for ordinary sensible objects. 
This doctrine is not Materialism, but it is 
the foundation of the simplest and most con- 
sistent form of Materialism. 

Atomism, both in its ordinary form and in 
the more refined theory of Lord Kelvin, 
seems to me to involve the fallacy of sub- 
stantiating an abstraction. If we attempted 
to determine the nature of a centre apart from 
a circumference, we should manifestly fall 
into the mistake of assuming that a centre 
is conceivable apart from a circumference ; an 
assumption which is as absurd as to suppose 
that a stick may have only one end, or that 
a thing may have an inside without an out- 
side. A centre is relative to a circumference, 
one end of a stick to the other end, an in- 



THE FAILURE OF MATERIALISM 1 97 

side to an outside. Now the same principle 
applies in the determination of the physical 
world: mass is real, but it is no more con- 
ceivable apart from force or motion than a 
centre apart from a circumference. Separate 
mass from motion, either actual or possible, 
and it can neither be known nor thought. 
Why is it affirmed by the man of science 
that " mass " is a necessary element in the 
world as known to us ? The answer is, that 
if we take any two bodies of the same vol- 
ume and the same degree of solidity and im- 
penetrability, it is found that they may differ 
in their accelerations, or changes of motion, 
under the action of the same force or the 
transference of the same motion. " Mass," in 
other words, is but another name for "inertia." 
The measure of mass is the amount of force 
or motion which must be communicated to a 
given body in order to produce a determi- 
nable rate of acceleration or deflection, and the 
measure of a force is the rate of change of 
momentum. There is therefore no inertia 
apart from force or motion ; the inertia and 
the force are correlative. Mass and motion 



198 THE CHRISTIAN- IDEAL OF LIFE 

are no doubt real, but they are real only in 
union with each other. It is also true that 
without these inseparable elements there would 
be no reality whatever, just as there can be 
no reality apart from the spatial and tem- 
poral relations which they presuppose. Hence 
it is utterly illegitimate to separate mass and 
motion, and to suppose that either could 
exist without the other: they are correlative 
aspects of that system of bodies which we 
call the physical universe, but apart from 
that system or from each other they have no 
meaning whatever. For just as mass has no 
reality except in union with force, so force 
has no reality apart from mass. If we sup- 
pose the mass of a body reduced to zero, 
any force must produce a motion infinitely 
great, and the body would be everywhere, i.e. 
nowhere. The atomic doctrine, in substan- 
tiating mass or inertia, and conceiving it as 
an independent reality, contradicts the fun- 
damental ideas of science. There are in 
the physical world no ultimate unchangeable 
units : there is a perpetual transformation of 
energy, and in this transformation its total 



THE FAILURE OF MATERIALISM 199 

quantity is constant, but this constancy is 
due, not to the unchangeability of ultimate 
units, but to the perfect correlation of the dis- 
tinguishable elements of mass and motion. 
The mass of a body is always relatively, but 
not absolutely, the same ; the energy of a 
material configuration is constant, but it is 
the constancy of a balanced system. 

It follows, from what has been said, that the 
physical sciences, in virtue of the fundamental 
ideas with which they operate, are limited to 
that aspect of the world in which it is con- 
ceived of as a mechanical system, Le. a system 
in which nothing is considered except mass 
and motion. Hence the laws of physical sci- 
ence cannot explain what is characteristic of 
living and conscious beings, — unless, indeed, 
the activities of these beings can be ex- 
pressed in terms of mass and motion. But, 
as the sentence quoted from Haeckel shows, 
there is a class of thinkers who maintain 
that not merely the growth of the plant and 
the sensitivity of the animal, but even the 
consciousness of man, must ultimately be 
"reduced to atomic mechanics." It is this 



200 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

application of the atomic doctrine which is 
usually called Materialism. In the scientific 
sense of the term, Materialism is the doctrine 
that the ultimate elements of the world are 
mass and motion, a doctrine which naturally 
suggests the philosophical theory that all the 
phenomena of the world must be explained by 
these elements alone. Many thinkers, how- 
ever, who maintain the scientific doctrine, re- 
fuse to draw the necessary inference from it, 
preferring to say that matter and mind are 
parallel and independent, but equally real. 
How this modified form of Materialism arises 
in the effort to avoid the difficulties of the 
more logically consistent form, we shall imme- 
diately see; at present I propose to consider 
Materialism in its extreme form, as formulated 
by such men as Buchner and Max Nordau. 
Materialism, as thus understood, maintains 
that mental processes are, in reality, physical 
processes, the former being in the last analy- 
sis functions of the nervous system. The 
antecedent and concomitant phenomena of 
conscious states are certain physiological 
processes in the brain and nervous system, 



THE FAILURE OF MATERIALISM 201 

and these states must therefore be regarded 
as a special form of motion, which does not 
differ in kind from other forms of motion, 
and is, therefore, subject to the law of the 
conservation of energy. Sensation is that 
mode of motion which arises in the brain as 
the result of the stimulation of a peripheral 
organ; impulse is the translation of a move- 
ment in the brain into the movement of 
muscular fibres. 

In dealing with this theory, the first thing 
we have to do is to be perfectly clear as to 
what it means. Does it mean (i) that mental 
processes are the effect of physical processes ? 
or (2) that mental processes are themselves 
physical processes? These two views are by 
no means identical, and yet no clear distinc- 
tion is drawn between them by the exponents 
of Materialism. Buchner, for example, tells 
us that " matter in motion acts on the mind 
through the mediation of the sense-organs, 
and causes motion in it," and that " this in 
turn produces material movements in nerves 
and muscles." The meaning of this state- 
ment would seem to be that mental states 



202 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

are the effect of movements in the brain, but 
are distinct from those movements. But we 
find in this writer another class of statements, 
in which mental processes are identified with 
physical states of the brain. Thus he says: 
" Thought can and must be regarded as a 
special form of the general motion of nature, 
which is as peculiar to the substance of the 
central nerve-elements as contraction is to 
the muscles, or the motion of light to the 
world-ether." In support of this conclusion 
he appeals to the experiments which show 
that mental processes require time for their 
occurrence. The " necessary conclusion fol- 
lows that the psychical act, or act of thought, 
occurs in an extended, impenetrable and 
composite substratum, and that such an act 
is, therefore, nothing but a form of move- 
ment." * 

Now if Materialism is understood to mean 
that thought is simply a movement in the 
brain, it does not seem worth one's while 
wasting many words in refutation of it. 

* Biichner's Kraft und Stoff, as quoted in Paulsen's Introduction 
to Philosophy, Am. tr., p. 81. 






THE FAILURE OF MATERIALISM 203 

Whatever thought is, it is certainly not 
motion. No doubt mental processes occupy 
time, but it is absurd to assume that nothing- 
occupies time except that which is in motion. 
Time is a form in which all changes occur, 
and as mental processes involve change they 
of course occupy time ; but, unless on the 
untenable supposition that the only possible 
form of change is motion, there is no reason 
whatever for affirming that mental processes 
are movements. To this view it is suffi- 
cient to answer, with Professor Paulsen, that 
" thought is not motion, but thought." # And 
yet it will be found that the main strength 
of Materialism lies in the assumption that 
thought is a mode of motion. For it is main- 
tained that to mental as well as physical pro- 
cesses the law of the conservation of energy 
is applicable ; and that law, as we have seen, 
has no meaning except as applied to the rela- 
tive movements of bodies. 

If, then, thought is not a mode of motion, 
the only refuge of Materialism is to say that 
physical movements are related to mental pro- 

* Paulsen's Introduction to Philosophy, p. 8$. 






204 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

cesses as cause to effect. Now if we adopt 
this view, we must surrender the doctrine of 
the conservation of energy. According to 
that doctrine, all energy manifests itself in 
motion, and only upon this supposition can 
it be shown to be incapable of increase or 
diminution, But if nervous movement is the 
cause of sensation, in the latter a new product 
is generated which is distinct from the former; 
and this requires us to suppose that, in addi- 
tion to the energy expended in producing the 
nervous movement, there is another source of 
energy in the universe. Materialism, however, 
cannot admit the existence of more than one 
form of energy without becoming dualistic, 
and hence it must maintain that nervous 
energy is transformed into sensation, in the 
same way as mechanical energy is transformed 
into heat or light. But in that case the total 
quantity of energy in the universe must be 
lessened by the amount transformed into sen- 
sation, and the law of the conservation of en- 
ergy will break down when it is applied to the 
total process of motion, actual and possible, 
as exhibited in a physical system. We are 



THE FAILURE OF MATERIALISM 205 

therefore reduced to this alternative : either 
there are two sources of energy in the uni- 
verse, — one giving rise to mental states and 
the other to motion, — or the scientific doc- 
trine of the conservation of energy is false. 
If we adopt the former view, we must aban- 
don the theory of the interaction of physical 
and mental processes, and maintain that 
there is no causal relation between them; 
if we adopt the latter view, the whole super- 
structure of physical science falls to pieces. 
It was not to be expected that the very foun- 
dation upon which science rests should be 
abandoned, and hence we find that, though 
they unwarrantably continue to speak of body 
acting upon mind, the advocates of Material- 
ism are usually led to put forward a doctrine 
which is really a surrender of Materialism, — 
the doctrine that mental states are not effects, 
but concomitants, of nervous movements. In 
this way they seek to maintain the constancy 
of the total quantity of energy without doing- 
open violence to the nature of mind. Is it 
true, then, that mind is merely something 
which accompanies, without influencing or 



206 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

being influenced by nervous movements ? Do 
mental processes, in other words, lie entirely 
outside the chain of physical events, corre- 
sponding to, but entirely independent of them ? 
This is the view maintained by Clifford, who 
writes : " The two things are on two utterly 
different platforms — the physical facts go 
along by themselves, and the mental facts go 
along by themselves. There is a parallelism 
between them, but there is no interference of 
one with the other. . . . The mind, then, is 
to be regarded as a stream of feelings, which 
runs parallel to and simultaneous with a cer- 
tain part of the action of the body." 

It seems obvious that, on this theory, there 
are in the universe two independent sources 
of energy, — that which manifests itself in 
physical changes, and that which is ex- 
pressed in mental changes. And these two 
series of changes, though they have no con- 
nexion with each other, are yet precisely 
correspondent : so that we must assume a 
pre-established harmony between them. We 
thus reach the strange conclusion that two 
absolutely independent series, in some utterly 



THE FAILURE OF MATERIALISM 207 

inexplicable way, always change concurrently. 
But if each series is entirely independent of 
the other, the physical changes would evi- 
dently be precisely what they are, even were 
there no mental changes : and, conversely, the 
mental changes would go on even if the physi- 
cal changes were annihilated. This conclusion 
is so paradoxical, that we cannot be surprised 
to find an attempt made to show that, though 
the two series are distinct, they yet are in- 
separably associated, so that neither takes 
place apart from the other. " When any 
one is pleased, stimulated, cheered, by food, 
wine, or bracing air," says Professor Bain, 
"we call the influence physical; it operates 
on the viscera, and through these upon the 
nerves, by a chain of sequence purely physi- 
cal. When one is cheered by good news, 
by a pleasing spectacle, or by a stroke of 
success, the influence is mental; sensation, 
thought, and consciousness are part of the 
chain; although these cannot be sustained 
without their physical basis. The proper 
physical fact is a single, one-sided objective 
fact; the mental fact is a two-sided fact, one 



2o8 THE CHRISTIAN' IDEAL OF LIFE 

of its sides being a train of feelings, thoughts, 
or other subjective elements." * 

Here it is implied that conscious acts are 
only occasional concomitants of nerve-changes. 
Up to a certain point there is a single physi- 
cal series, then the series becomes two-sided, 
and once more it becomes single. What, then, 
gives rise to the mental side of the twofold 
fact ? It cannot be the physical energy of the 
organism, for that energy expresses itself only 
in motion. Hence the mental aspect must 
be due to a new source of energy, entirely 
independent of the physical. But this brings 
us back to the old difficulty of two parallel and 
independent series, corresponding but having 
no real connexion with each other. To speak 
of these two series as identical is to use words 
without meaning ; it is, in fact, to affirm iden- 
tity and separation at the same time. 

We have now dealt with the various forms 
which Materialism assumes, and in every case 
we have found that it leads to insuperable 
difficulties. (i) A consistent Materialism is 
forced to the conclusion that mental processes 

* Bain's Mind and Body, p. 134. 



THE FAILURE OF MATERIALISM 2O9 

are not different in their fundamental nature 
from physical processes, but, like them, are 
a mode of motion. This doctrine explains 
mental processes by assuming that they are 
what they manifestly are not. (2) Hence Ma- 
terialism is led to maintain that acts of mind, 
while they are not movements, are effects of 
movement. But this view is incompatible 
with the scientific principle of the conserva- 
tion of energy. (3) To obviate this objection 
it is affirmed that mental and physical pro- 
cesses are entirely independent of each other, 
and yet perfectly correspond. (4) But some 
explanation of this correspondence is required, 
and it is suggested that mental acts and nerve- 
changes are a single fact with two "faces" or 
"aspects." This doctrine, however, does not 
get rid of the difficulty that mental acts are 
an entirely different product from physical 
movements, and must therefore be referred to 
an independent source of energy. Thus we 
are driven back upon the theory of parallelism, 
— the theory that there are two independent 
streams of changes, which have no known 
connexion with each other, and which there- 



2IO THE CHRISTIAN* IDEAL OF LIFE 

fore, to all intents and purposes, constitute two 
separate and independent worlds. Under the 
stress of this difficulty, writers like Mr. Spen- 
cer take refuge in the idea of a reality, to us 
unknown, and even unknowable, which mani- 
fests itself in two disparate ways, but which 
in itself is an absolute unity. Such a view 
leads to the conclusion that our intelligence is 
by its very nature incapable of reducing to 
unity the two independent spheres of mind 
and nature. We are, indeed, compelled to 
assume that in itself reality is one, but the 
limitations of our knowledge prevent us from 
understanding how it can be one. We are, 
in fact, asked to admit that what appears to 
us as absolutely distinct is yet somehow, we 
know not how, absolutely identical. This is 
nothing less than the assumption that our 
intelligence is in contradiction with itself: 
that in the region of knowledge we find an 
absolute dualism which can never be overcome, 
while yet reality, as it is in itself, must by its 
very nature transcend that dualism. Surely it 
is a much less intolerable alternative to sup- 
pose that the asserted "fundamental incohe- 



THE FAILURE OF MATERIALISM 211 

rence" in our knowledge is due, not to the 
nature of knowledge itself, but to a false 
theory of knowledge. We have therefore to 
ask whether the unity of knowledge cannot be 
preserved at a less cost than the sacrifice of 
all knowledge of reality. Is it true that mind 
and nature are absolute opposites, and that we 
can only maintain their ultimate unity by a 
leap into the dark abyss of the unknowable ? 
Can we say nothing of reality except that we 
can say nothing of it ? 

Now we have seen that the scientific view 
of the world rests upon the two ideas of mass 
and motion, and that these two ideas are 
strictly correlative. There are no independent 
realities corresponding to the conception of 
ultimate atoms : there is but one system of 
nature, in which each element possesses reality 
only in its relations to other elements. But 
this idea of a system of mutually related ele- 
ments still leaves us with a very inadequate 
comprehension of reality as a whole. As 
Materialism is forced to admit, there lie out- 
side of it the whole of the mental processes, 
since the system of nature is limited to those 



2 12 THE CHRISTIAN- IDEAL OF LIFE 

changes which are expressible in some form of 
motion. It is impossible to avoid the conclu- 
sion that the conception of nature as a system 
of actual and possible movements presupposes 
a unity of a deeper and more comprehensive 
kind. The inadequacy of the scientific view, 
when it is taken as an ultimate explanation 
of reality, it is not hard to show. That view 
explains all the changes which occur in the 
world by referring them to other changes. 
But in this way we are referred from one 
change to another, without ever reaching an 
ultimate explanation. We fall into an infinite 
series, whether we attempt to reach com- 
pleteness in the way of coexistence or of 
succession : the world of nature, as we soon 
discover, has no completeness either in ex- 
tension or in time ; we cannot find an infi- 
nitely small or an infinitely large unit, nor can 
we find an absolute beginning or end in the 
process of the world. The true reality, as we 
are forced to conclude, is only partially appre- 
hended when it is conceived as a mechanical 
system. It is, however, a fundamental mistake 
to fall back upon the idea of an indefinable 



THE FAILURE OF MATERIALISM 213 

something — we know not what — lying be- 
yond the system of nature ; for on that suppo- 
sition, the system of nature is a pure illusion ; 
what we must hold is, that a conception of the 
orderly process of change, as presupposing 
constant relations in the way of quantity, is the 
first inadequate grasp of the truth that the 
universe is a rational or intelligible system. 
Thus, on the one hand, the scientific concep- 
tion of the world is partial or relative, while, 
on the other hand, it is absolute in the sense 
that the fixed relations of moving bodies to 
one another must be presupposed in any true 
theory of the universe. The tacit presuppo- 
sition of science is that the world is one, and 
yet the unity which it reaches is never com- 
plete. Thus, it may be fairly said that the 
scientific view of the world contradicts itself. 
The contradiction, however, springs from the 
struggle between the explicit conception of 
the world as defined in the idea of energy, and 
a deeper conception of it which is only implicit. 
For, though the world as defined by science is 
not a complete unity, we cannot discard the 
presupposition that the world really is a com- 



214 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

plete unity without falling into hopeless incon- 
sistency. It is impossible for us to know that 
the universe is not a unity, since we cannot lift 
ourselves out of the universe we know, any 
more than we can jump over our own heads. 
What we have to observe, therefore, is, that 
the scientific view of the world as an ordered 
system of movements presupposes a single 
principle to which all movements must be 
referred. We have experience of certain 
changes, which are relative to other changes, 
but ultimately all these changes imply a prin- 
ciple of change which is self-originating. This 
self-active source of all motion is tacitly implied 
in the doctrine of the conservation of energy. 
Energy manifests itself as a perpetual process 
in varying forms of motion, but these manifes- 
tations in no way diminish or exhaust it. Pres- 
ent in all these forms, it yet remains identical 
with itself, or perpetually goes out of itself 
without losing its self-identity. Thus, while 
the doctrine of the conservation of energy em- 
phasises the permanence of energy in all the 
changes of the world, it yet tacitly implies the 
outgoing of energy in an eternal process of 



THE FAILURE OF MATERIALISM 215 

change. Now it is this latent aspect of the 
doctrine which is brought to light and em- 
phasised in the principle of evolution. The 
transition from the one idea to the other, 
which has taken place in the development of 
modern thought, is therefore not an accident, 
but is itself an illustration of the evolution of 
ideas. It will, therefore, be advisable to con- 
sider what are the philosophical implications 
of the evolutionary view of the world. 



CHAPTER IX 

THE IDEALISTIC INTERPRETATION OF NATURAL 
EVOLUTION 

That the doctrine of the conservation of 
energy naturally leads on to the idea of the 
world as involving a process of development, 
is instinctively felt even by those who are the 
most ardent adherents of the atomic or me- 
chanical theory of the world. Thus Tyndall, 
who firmly believed that atoms were " real 
things," and spoke of the "clear, sharp, me- 
chanically intelligible atomic theory," yet " dis- 
cerned," in what he calls " matter," " the 
promise and potency of every form and qual- 
ity of life." Now it is obvious that if " mat- 
ter" is conceived of as ultimate indivisible 
atoms, it cannot contain the "promise and 
potency " of anything whatever. For the very 
conception of such atoms implies that, in all 
the changes of the world, they are absolutely 

216 



IDEALISM AND NATURAL EVOLUTION 2\J 

unchangeable. They were present in the 
primitive nebulous mist in the same unchang- 
ing rigidity and completeness as now, and they 
must remain unaltered so long as the world 
endures. They are, in the language of Mr. 
Balfour Stewart, " immortal beings," and in- 
deed the only " immortal beings " of which 
the atomic doctrine has any knowledge. There 
is, therefore, on this view no possibility of 
" matter " developing into anything ; what it 
is in the beginning it must remain to the end. 
It may perhaps be answered that what Tyn- 
dall meant to say was, that the primitive atoms 
were capable of ever new transpositions and 
groupings, and that " every form and quality 
of life " arises in this way. But even if we 
admit that there is nothing in the nature of 
a living organism which cannot be explained 
in terms of atoms and their relative move- 
ments, — a very large admission, indeed, — the 
atomic doctrine is confessedly incompetent to 
account for the simplest mental act. This is 
maintained by Tyndall himself, when he tells 
us that " the passage from the physics of the 
brain to the corresponding facts of conscious- 



218 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

ness is unthinkable." But if there is an im- 
passable gulf between physical and mental 
changes, how can it possibly be affirmed that 
" matter " contains " the promise and potency 
of every form and quality of life " ? Is it not 
obvious that what is here called " matter " is 
a name for reality as a whole ? What Tyn- 
dall must mean is that the world, even in its 
earliest form, contains implicitly all that is 
involved in its subsequent stages. We have 
therefore to ask what is implied in this new 
way of regarding the world. This question 
has, to some extent, been dealt with in con- 
nexion with the doctrine of Natural Selection; 
but it is proposed in this chapter to examine 
the scientific doctrine of evolution in its widest 
sense, as held by those thinkers who seek to 
connect the successive stages in the history of 
the world in an unbroken series, and w T ho deny 
that Natural Selection of itself is adequate to 
the explanation of biological evolution. 

The principle of evolution, it is held, when 
it is taken in a sufficiently comprehensive sense, 
explains the whole process of the world. The 
present universal cosmical order has been 



IDEALISM AND NATURAL EVOLUTION 2x9 

gradually evolved. The details of the process 
are not precisely known, but the generally ac- 
cepted view is that known as the Nebular 
Hypothesis, which explains the origin of the 
present stellar, solar, planetary, satellitic, and 
meteoric systems in accordance with known 
laws of motion. This first stage of evolution, 
which may be called the cosmical, was fol- 
lowed by the chemical stage. In the former, 
the action of chemical affinity was prevented 
by the dissociative activity of intense primal 
heat ; but as the earth gradually cooled, chemi- 
cal affinity came into play, and compounds 
were formed. By repeated combinations and 
recombinations, these compounds became more 
complex and unstable, and finally resulted in 
protoplasm, the most complex and unstable 
of all known substances. Thus protoplasm is 
the last product of chemical evolution, and the 
beginning of organic evolution. The third 
phase of evolution consists in the new process 
of organisation, which is effected by the co- 
operation of at least five factors, and results 
in the gradual formation of higher and higher 
forms, culminating in man. These factors are : 



220 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

(i) the pressure of a changing environment, 
(2) use and disuse of organs, (3) natural selec- 
tion, (4) sexual selection, (5) physiological 
selection. The last phase of evolution is that 
of human progress, which is distinguished 
from the others in being rational or self- 
conscious.* 

I propose to ask what are the philosophical 
implications of this doctrine, admitting the 
scientific evidence for it to be satisfactory. 
If it is accepted, there can be no doubt that it 
makes the purely mechanical or materialistic 
conception of the world incredible. For, 
whereas in the mechanical theory all the 
changes in the world are reduced to ultimate 
atoms and their movements, in the evolutionist 
view we must maintain that the world can be 
explained only by conceiving it as a unity 
which contains within itself the principle of its 
own development. There was a time, it is 
held, when chemical action was in abeyance. 
This state of things was followed by the opera- 

* The details of this evolutionary process are given with great clear- 
ness and impressiveness by Dr. Le Conte in the Monist, for July, 1895, 
pp. 481-500. 






IDEALISM AND NATURAL EVOLUTION 221 



tion of chemical affinity and the formation of 
compounds. It is thus obvious that we can 
no longer speak of the world as a mechanical 
system, but only as a system which is at once 
mechanical and chemical. Hence the attempt 
to explain the world on purely mechanical 
principles must necessarily end in failure. 
But this attempt is made by those who hold 
that all forms of existence are reducible to 
"atomic mechanics. " The evolutionist view, 
on the contrary, admitting that the world origi- 
nally appeared as a mechanical system, holds 
that it developed into a system in which a new 
form of energy came into play, — the energy 
of chemical affinity. Now this new form of 
energy is not added from without, but is in- 
volved in the system of the universe ; and 
hence we must hold that the world is a self- 
developing unity, ■ — a unity which is not a dead 
unchanging identity, but an identity which 
originates new forms of energy. The idea of 
evolution, in other words, combines the ideas 
of identity and difference, and combines them 
in such a way that the identity originates the 
difference, without ceasing to be identity. 



222 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

There is thus at once differentiation and inte- 
gration, with the result that the world exhibits 
more perfect unity and greater variety. And 
if we follow the process of evolution into its 
next stage, we find the same truth exemplified. 
Chemical compounds are succeeded by organ- 
isms, which are self-maintaining and self-propa- 
gating. But, according to the evolutionist 
doctrine, this new form of energy is involved 
in the one single system, and to that system 
we must attribute the power of creating life. 
Nor can we identify life with chemical affinity, 
much less with mechanical force : we can only 
state the facts by saying that, as the world 
developes from a mechanical into a chemical 
system, so it developes from a chemical into an 
organic system. It is thus manifest that we 
can discover the true nature of the world only 
by following it through all its phases, and that 
the attempt to define it in its completeness by 
leaving out the later and more developed forms 
can only result in a partial and distorted con- 
ception of its real nature. Upon such an ab- 
stract view Materialism is based, and hence an 
evolutionistic Materialism is a contradiction in 



IDEALISM AND NATURAL EVOLUTION 223 

terms. This will become still clearer if we 
consider what is implied in the various so- 
called " factors " of organic evolution. 

(1) The first " factor " is said to be the "pres- 
sure of a changing environment." Now it 
should be observed that the "changing envi- 
ronment" must not be conceived as acting upon 
the living being in a purely mechanical way. 
When it is said that the changes of function 
and structure are "produced" by the environ- 
ment, the whole effect seems to be ascribed to 
the environment. For the special purposes of 
biology this may be adequate, but in seeking 
to interpret the fact in its full significance, we 
must remember that the effect would not take 
place at all, unless the thing acted upon were a 
living being, and indeed a living being having 
a certain specific nature. The true " cause," 
therefore, is not the environment, but the 
environment as relative to the specific nature 
of the living being. There is, in fact, no 
" environment " apart from the living being. 
What is really meant by the " pressure of a 
changing environment " is the change which 
takes place in a living being under certain con- 



224 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

ditions, internal and external ; in other words, 
the adaptability of a living being to changing 
conditions. But this adaptability implies the 
capacity on the part of the living being of 
maintaining itself under changing conditions, 
or its power of recovering itself from the action 
upon it of forces that would otherwise destroy 
it. Thus the seemingly mechanical relation 
of organism and environment is not really 
mechanical : it differs from mechanism in im- 
plying a tendency to individuation or self- 
maintenance. Apart from this tendency, — 
which Plato and Aristotle called the " idea " or 
"form," — there is no life; and hence to speak 
of the " pressure of a changing environment " 
is really to imply that a living being converts 
the environment into the means of its own life. 
(2) The second " factor" employed in expla- 
nation of the evolution of living beings is 
that of " use and disuse." Here again the 
biologist naturally looks at the question from 
the point of view of external causation. What 
he wishes to explain is the fact that organs 
increase or diminish, and it is enough for 
him to point to the fact that the change is 



IDEALISM AND NATURAL EVOLUTION 22 $ 

concurrent with use or disuse, and may be 
partially transmitted to descendants. But it 
is none the less true, that the use or disuse 
of an organ is but another aspect of that 
tendency to self -maintenance or individuation 
which we have already seen to be inseparable 
from the living being. It has indeed been 
even said that the use of an organ implies 
"consciousness and volition." To this state- 
ment I should demur, on the ground that " con- 
sciousness " and " volition " only exist where 
the knowing or willing subject distinguishes 
itself from the object known or willed, whereas 
organs are used by living beings which make 
no such distinction. But what is meant prob- 
ably is, that no living being uses or disuses an 
organ except under the impulse to self-main- 
tenance. The use or disuse of an organ 
implies that the being possessing it is an 
individual with a differentiation of parts, en- 
abling it to make the environment an instru- 
ment of its own life. It is in the effort after 
self-maintenance that the living being uses an 
organ, and it is because an organ has ceased 
to minister to that end that it ceases to be 



226 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

used and finally disappears or becomes rudi- 
mentary. It thus seems to me that the two 
first " factors " are in essence the same. The 
pressure of the environment is at bottom the 
same principle of adaptation to external con- 
ditions as the use or disuse of an organ, the 
latter being merely a more specific case of 
the former. 

(3) Natural selection, unlike the first two 
factors, brings into prominence the connexion 
of living beings with one another. By the 
principle of inheritance certain variations occur 
in offspring, and where they are favourable 
to the existence of the beings possessing 
them, these beings tend to survive and to per- 
petuate the variations in their descendants. 
After what has been said above, * the reader 
need only be reminded that natural selection 
presupposes the tendency to self-maintenance 
and the adaptability of the organism to the 
environment, and therefore the evolution of 
ever higher forms of being. For though the 
variations in offspring are due to obscure con- 
ditions, no one doubts that the conditions are 

* Chapter VII., pp. 181-191. 



IDEALISM AND NATURAL EVOLUTION 227 

there, and are therefore inseparable from the 
system of nature. There is nothing "for- 
tuitous " in the variations which arise from 
inheritance, in the conditions which make 
certain variations favourable to the perpetua- 
tion of the beings possessing them, or in the 
transmission of such variations when they 
occur. 

(4) The factor of "sexual selection" is mani- 
festly a special way in which the higher evolu- 
tion of living beings is secured and perpetuated. 
It operates only in the higher animals, and 
therefore appears only in the later stages of 
biological evolution. It does not seem to me 
to involve " consciousness and will," in the 
sense in which we employ these terms in 
speaking of man, but it certainly involves 
feeling and impulse. The animal is the me- 
dium of the tendency to race-maintenance 
and to the perpetuation of higher forms. 
Here, in fact, we see the tendency to the 
evolution of more perfect beings becoming, 
so to speak, inward, — a tendency which is 
exemplified in the whole process of evolu- 
tion. 



228 THE CHRISTIAN' IDEAL OF LIFE 

(5) The last factor, the "segregation of varie- 
ties within the limits of inter-fertility/' brings 
into prominence the fact that there is a fixed 
limit to the possible varieties of living being. 
The unity of nature not only implies the de- 
velopment of ever higher forms of being, but 
it also implies a formative tendency which 
operates in fixed ways, and tends to that in- 
dividuation of type which is as essential to 
an organic system as the tendency to the 
formation of new types. Thus we are once 
more brought to the conclusion that nothing 
in nature is merely accidental ; that, on the 
contrary, wide as is the range of possible 
variations, there are fixed limits which cannot 
be transcended ; in other words, that living- 
beings only differ from lower forms of exist- 
ence in being the embodiment of a higher 
and more complex law. 

To the question whether we can speak of 
the various stages of evolution as differing 
in kind, or only in degree, it has been answered 
that what we call a difference in kind is merely 
a " great difference in degree." This seems 
to me only a half-truth. The distinction, for 



IDEALISM AND NATURAL EVOLUTION 229 

example, between human progress and animal 
evolution cannot be called merely a difference 
in degree, because the former is possible only 
under condition of the formation of ideals. 
This point will be considered more particu- 
larly in the next chapter; meantime it may 
serve to show that in the process of evolu- 
tion there are well-marked stages which can- 
not be explained away. On the other hand, 
it must not be forgotten that the principle of 
evolution does not allow us to interpolate 
arbitrary breaks in the process of the world. 
If evolution fails at one point, it logically fails 
at all points. At the same time the principle 
of evolution does not demand that the transi- 
tion from one stage to another should occur 
without qualitative differentiation. The world 
is an organic system, but for that very reason 
its various members are qualitatively distinct. 
It is the same principle which expresses itself 
in all the phases which we distinguish, and 
which have presented themselves one after 
the other, but we cannot resolve the later and 
higher phase into the earlier and lower. For 
the higher does not abolish the lower, but in- 



230 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

corporates it in a higher unity. Hence the 
later phase introduces a new element not 
found in the earlier. Any attempt to resolve 
the one into the other will simply abolish the 
distinction between them, and the whole idea 
of evolution will disappear. If chemical affinity 
introduces no element not already present in 
mechanical force, there is no distinction be- 
tween them, and therefore no evolution. There 
can, in fact, be no evolution unless there is pro- 
gressive differentiation. Neglect of this dis- 
tinction leads to some such doctrine as that of 
Leibnitz, which rests upon the idea of prefor- 
mation rather than evolution, and all the at- 
tempts of recent speculators to prove the 
rationality of the world by a revival of monad- 
ism, seem to me an abortive effort to abolish 
the qualitative distinctions without which there 
can be no genuine organic unity of the world. 
It is true, on the other hand, that the progres- 
sive differentiation exhibited in the process of 
the world does not destroy the unity of the 
whole ; it is the same unity which is revealed 
in the earlier as in the later stages, but this 
unity only reveals its perfection as it gradually 



IDEALISM AND NATURAL EVOLUTION 231 

unfolds itself. In the cosmical stao:e of evolu- 
tion we have the unity of a mechanical system, 
in which every part exhibits the equal and in- 
different stress of gravitation ; in the chemical 
stage, there is a selective activity of certain 
elements for one another; in the biological 
stage, the principle of individuation prevails, 
at first in an uncertain and indefinite way, 
and then, as we rise in the scale of life, in a 
more and more perfect form. 

It thus appears that the attempt to reduce 
the successive phases in the evolution of the 
world to a distinction of degree is due to 
the false assumption that the later stage con- 
tains nothing which is not already operative in 
the earlier stage, whereas evolution by its very 
nature consists in progressive specification. 
The unity which evolution demands is origi- 
native or creative : it is a unity which by its 
own self-activity generates new forms of reality. 
Nor need we shrink from admitting such a 
unity, when we consider that, even if we con- 
fine our attention to the cosmical stage, we are 
ultimately compelled to refer the process of 
change which is perpetually going on in the 



232 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

world to an eternal, self-active, and creative 
energy. This is the truth which lies at the 
basis of the theological doctrine, that the con- 
servation of the world is a continual creation. 
The mechanical doctrine, which hypostatises 
" matter," seems to get rid of this self-determin- 
ing principle only because it assumes the eter- 
nity of " matter " ; but as " matter " is nothing 
but an aspect of the changing world, unwarrant- 
ably substantiated as an independent reality by 
the analytic activity of thought, — that " tre- 
mendous power which gives life to the dead," 
as Hegel well calls it, # — we are entitled to say 
that in its isolation it is pure nothing. What 
we actually know is a world in which there is 
perpetual change, yet no exhaustion of energy ; 
a world, in other words, which exists only be- 
cause there is an infinite source of energy 
which is eternal and indestructible. This being 
so, the process of evolution merely makes more 
explicit the nature of that inexhaustible energy 
which reveals itself, not only in the constancy 
of mechanical force, but in the origination of 
new forms of finite reality, as exhibited in 

* Hegel's Phanomenologie des Geistes, p. 25. 



IDEALISM AND NATURAL EVOLUTION 2^X 

chemical affinity and in the production of higher 
and higher modes of life. 

It is evident from what has been said, that 
any one who properly realises what the prin- 
ciple of evolution involves has transcended the 
whole point of view which is occupied by the 
special sciences, including the science of biol- 
ogy. For the object of these sciences is to ex- 
plain the special conditions under which certain 
changes occur. It is true that science is im- 
plicitly beyond itself, if one may put the matter 
in this paradoxical way. The presupposition 
of every science, not excluding that which 
operates with the mechanical ideas of mass and 
motion, is that there is one system, within which 
all changes occur, and apart from which they 
could not take place. But though this is the 
presupposition of all the sciences, it is not made 
a definite object of reflection. It is for this 
reason that the scientific man is apt to endorse 
a philosophical view of the world, which, if it 
were true, would make an end of his science. 
Occupied in tracing the transformation of one 
form of energy into another, he is led to sup- 
pose that he can apply the same method of 



234 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

explanation to the whole, and hence he treats 
the world as if it involved no principle of unity. 
The same method is applied to living beings, 
with the result that no differences are found in 
them but those of degree of complexity. He 
speaks of the evolution of living beings, but he 
thinks of it as simply the successive appearance 
of new and more complex beings, produced by 
the mechanical interaction of the organism and 
the environment. Now the principle of evolu- 
tion, when we recognise what it really implies, 
compels us to view the process of the world in 
an entirely different way. Instead of looking at 
the successive forms which arise one after the 
other, and dealing only with their external 
relations to the environment, we have to con- 
ceive the whole process as the development of 
one principle, the true nature of which can be 
understood only in the final form which it 
assumes. From this vantage-ground, we look 
back upon the various stages in the process, 
and view them as steps towards a predeter- 
mined goal. Thus it becomes evident that the 
meaning of the earliest stage is partially re- 
vealed in the stage which succeeds it, and that 



IDEALISM AND NATURAL EVOLUTION 235 

ultimately the last stage explains all the rest. 
Hence none of the earlier stages can be re- 
garded as expressing the nature of the whole, 
while yet each is a prophecy of the next. 
The mechanical view of the world is therefore 
inadequate, not merely because it fails to explain 
the highest stage, but because it fails to explain 
even the lowest stage. Just because it treats 
the lowest stage as if it were ultimate, it fails to 
grasp the truth that this stage is but the im- 
perfect revelation of a principle not fully dis- 
closed. When we look at the matter in this 
way, we see that cosmic evolution is the first 
step toward the creation of forms which con- 
tain in themselves the explicit meaning of the 
whole. Hence we find, as we should expect, 
that the higher animals already suggest that 
self-conscious comprehension of the meaning 
of the world, which is characteristic of man ; 
nay, the whole creation " groans and travails " 
toward the goal which in man is attained in 
idea. In the cosmical stage, the principle of 
unity manifests itself in the law of gravitation, 
by which every particle is kept in its place ; in 
the second stage, it is seen in the more explicit 



236 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

form of chemical compounds ; in the plant and 
animal, we have the unity of an organism ; in 
man, we find the unity of a personal self. We 
have therefore to ask what is implied in this 
last and highest stage of evolution. 






CHAPTER X 

IDEALISM AND HUMAN PROGRESS 

If the philosophical interpretation of evolu- 
tion which has been outlined in the preceding 
chapter is sound, it is obvious that there is 
no escape from the conclusion that the world 
must be conceived as in its temporal process 
the gradual manifestation of a principle which 
is at least an ever-living and self-determining 
reality, and that these finite forms of reality, 
as they successively emerge, assume more and 
more the form of an organic unity in which 
the life of the whole is realised in each. But 
though we are thus compelled to conceive the 
ultimate principle as creative and living, and 
therefore as so far truly revealed only in the 
highest form of life, we have not yet been led 
to maintain that it is self-conscious or rational. 
Only when we pass to man, the last term in 

237 



238 THE CHRISTIAN- IDEAL OF LIFE 

the process, do we begin to see that no other 
conception is adequate. The higher animals 
no doubt foreshadow the self-conscious reason 
of man, but there seems to me no evidence 
that they possess reason, in the sense that 
they are capable of comprehending the prin- 
ciple which gives meaning to nature in all 
its forms. No being can properly be called 
"rational" which is not capable of explicitly 
grasping the universal in the particular, or, 
what is the same thing, which is not capable 
of abstracting from the immediate life of feel- 
ing and making that life in its ideal tendency 
the object of intelligent purpose. Reason 
therefore implies the capacity in man of re- 
turning upon himself and making himself an 
object. And, as he cannot contemplate him- 
self as an object without becoming aware that 
as an individual he is but a "part of this par- 
tial world," reason implies the more or less 
explicit consciousness of a unity which is the 
presupposition of all selves and all objects. 
These three ideas — the world, the self, and 
God — are inseparably united in the self-con- 
sciousness of man, and all human develop- 



IDEALISM AND HUMAN PROGRESS 239 

ment or progress consists in their progressive 
specification by reference to one another. 

Now if it is true that the life of man is car- 
ried on in the medium of reason, it is obvious 
that human progress cannot be adequately in- 
terpreted by any theory which fails to allow 
for the transformation effected by the pres- 
ence of reason. If the rational life consists 
in making the immediate life in its ideal ten- 
dency or meaning an object, the evolution of 
man begins on a higher level than the other 
stages of evolution which precede and prepare 
the way for it. As rational or self-conscious, 
human evolution not only cannot be explained 
mechanically, but it cannot even be explained 
biologically, especially when biology speaks in 
terms of mechanics. At the same time, the 
rational life of man rests upon and presup- 
poses his natural life, and can be realised 
only by a comprehension of that life, and a 
subordination of it to ideas which are in har- 
mony with the whole nature of things. The 
rational life thus implies insight into the 
laws of nature and of human nature, and 
this again means that it is social. We may 



240 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

therefore say that the whole process of hu- 
man evolution consists in the gradual reali- 
sation of reason in the individual and in 
society, and the gradual comprehension of 
the meaning of both when viewed in their 
relation to the world and God. The pro- 
gress of man is thus from one point of view a 
transcendence of nature ; from another point of 
view, it is simply the self-conscious develop- 
ment of the end toward which evolution was 
tending from the first. It is a transcendence 
of nature, because in grasping the meaning 
of natural law, including the law of his own 
sensitive life, man is enabled to create a 
higher nature within nature ; it is a develop- 
ment of nature, because man is himself the 
highest product of nature, or rather of that 
universal principle which is manifested in 
nature. Nevertheless, we have to recognise 
that the higher life of humanity is not an 
original endowment, but must be won by con- 
tinual toil and effort. The easy optimism, 
which finds the world a very comfortable 
and pleasant place to live in, is as superficial 
as the pessimism which condemns the world 



IDEALISM AND HUMAN PROGRESS 24 1 

because it is full of pain. No doubt the 
rational life must bring satisfaction, but only 
because it lifts man into union with the prin- 
ciple of all existence ; and this elevation can 
only be the result of strenuous effort, involv- 
ing the sacrifice of all that, however pleasant 
in itself, hinders the development of the race. 
The world is by its very nature fitted for the 
development of the rational life, but we must 
accept the conditions under which alone that 
life can be realised. The past history of 
man shows us that human progress is a con- 
tinual subordination of the immediate con- 
ditions of life to higher ends. " Men in 
society," says Huxley, " are undoubtedly sub- 
ject to the cosmic process. As among other 
animals, multiplication goes on without ces- 
sation and involves severe competition for 
the means of support. The struggle for ex- 
istence tends to eliminate those less fitted 
to adapt themselves to the circumstances of 
their existence. The strongest, the most 
self-assertive, tend to tread down the weaker. 
But the influence of the cosmic process on 
the evolution of society is the greater, the 



242 THE CHRISTIAN- IDEAL OF LIFE 

more rudimentary its civilisation. Social pro- 
gress means a checking of the cosmic process 
at every step and the substitution for it of 
another, which may be called the ethical 
process ; the end of which is not the survival 
of those who happen to be fittest, in respect 
of the whole of the conditions which exist, 
but of those which are ethically the best." # 
These are perhaps the wisest, as they are 
almost the latest, words which Huxley ever 
wrote. Without attempting to reconcile them 
with his other utterances, we may take them 
as a late admission that human progress is 
not a mechanical, but a rational process. If 
social progress consists in "checking the cos- 
mic process," there must be in man a higher 
nature which enables him to discover the 
hidden meaning of that process and to work 
in harmony with it. Hence I cannot endorse 
the language in which Huxley subsequently 
characterises the relation of man to the uni- 
verse. " In man," he says, " there lies a fund 
of energy, operating intelligently and so far 
akin to that which pervades the universe, 

* Huxley's Evolution and Morality, p. 32. 



IDEALISM AND HUMAN PROGRESS 243 

that it is competent to influence and modify 
the cosmic process. In virtue of his intelli- 
gence, the dwarf bends the Titan to his 
will." # It is strange that a writer who 
comes so near to the idealistic conception of 
existence should fall back upon the agnostic 
idea of an inscrutable Power, which is con- 
ceived as irrational and hostile to man, though 
somehow man is so cunning as to outwit it. 
Is man, then, not the product of this Power? 
Could the "dwarf" bend the "Titan" to his 
will, if the " Titan " were determined to thwart 
him? Is it not manifest that, if man can 
subdue nature to himself, it must be be- 
cause nature is meant to be subdued? The 
conception of a struggle between man and 
the principle which sustains human life as 
well as nature, involves the absurdity of a 
principle which is at war with itself. Obvi- 
ously this new Manichaeism is no more satis- 
factory than the old. The rational process of 
human life implies that nature and human 
nature are not opposed ; in other words, that 
the principle manifested in both is reason. 
* ibid. P . 35. 



244 THE CHRISTIAN- IDEAL OF LIFE 

It may help to bring into clearer relief what 
is here contended, namely/ that human pro- 
gress consists in the gradual realisation of rea- 
son, if we consider the most recent attempt to 
interpret social evolution from the point of 
view of the biological law of natural selection. 
In his Social Evolution, Mr. Kidd claims to 
have discovered the " natural law " of human 
progress, — a law which he even thinks may 
effect as great a revolution in sociology as the 
law of gravitation in physical science. Man, 
he contends, is "absolutely subservient to a 
fundamental physiological law," the " law of 
retrogression " ; and this law can be counter- 
acted only by " the prevalence of conditions 
in which selection can prevail." Reason urges 
man to suspend the "struggle for existence," 
which is the necessary condition of progress; 
and were it not that religion proves too strong 
for reason, and " supplies the ultimate sanction 
for that effort and sacrifice necessary to the 
continuance of the process of evolution," the 
progress of man would be arrested. 

(i) Mr. Kidd, then, contends that natural 
selection, which he identifies with a " struggle 



IDEALISM AND HUMAN PROGRESS 245 

for existence," is the sole principle of progress 
both in man and in beings lower than man. 
Now, even if it is admitted that natural selec- 
tion is the sole factor in organic evolution, it 
is not hard to show that Mr. Kidd has inter- 
preted it in a sense which entirely changes its 
meaning. Natural selection, in the biological 
sense, is a principle which operates indepen- 
dently of individual effort. It is based upon 
the inheritance of favourable characteristics, 
and the transmission of these to descendants. 
But human progress does not depend upon the 
inheritance and transmission of such charac- 
teristics, but upon the ideas developed by 
reason and communicated through the ra- 
tional medium of language and social insti- 
tutions. Strangely enough, Mr. Kidd himself 
enters into an elaborate argument to show that 
the development of reason is the necessary 
condition of progress, and yet he seems un- 
aware that he has thus taken the ground from 
under his own feet. Reason is not accumu- 
lated by inheritance, but constitutes a spiritual 
medium which is independent of or rather 
transcends inheritance. And when Mr. Kidd 



246 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

assumes that " natural selection" and "struggle 
for existence " are convertible terms, he is 
plainly confusing what is accidental with what 
is essential. In biological evolution it is true 
that numerous beings are sacrificed, but there 
is no " law of retrogression " such as Mr. 
Kidd invents to suit his preconceived theory. 
Beings " survive," not because of the "struggle 
for existence," but in spite of it, as is proved 
by the fact that in artificial selection, where 
individuals are placed in the most favourable 
conditions, the rate of progress is much more 
rapid than in nature, where the " struggle for 
existence " is unchecked. The development of 
higher and higher forms of being is due to 
the inheritance of favourable variations, and 
hence the law of biological evolution is a law 
of progress, not of retrogression. But even if 
it were true that living beings in a state of 
nature are subject to a " law of retrogres- 
sion," it would not follow that man is under 
the same law ; for the " advantages " which 
enable individuals and societies to progress are 
not inherited, but are developed and commu- 
nicated irrespective of inheritance. No doubt, 



IDEALISM AND HUMAN PROGRESS 247 

in imperfect forms of society, the social heri- 
tage is communicated unequally, but in no 
form of society is the individual left to struggle 
with nature on the basis purely of his inher- 
ited tendencies. Even slaves participated in 
the advantages secured by the combined rea- 
son of the race. 

(2) Mr. Kidd's special contribution to soci- 
ology, however, is his assertion that in man 
there are two opposite factors, — reason and 
religion, — and that progress consists in the 
subordination of the former to the latter. By 
" reason " Mr. Kidd means a purely intel- 
lectual faculty, the function of which is to 
determine what is of advantage to the indi- 
vidual, as distinguished from what is of advan- 
tage to the race. Man has certain natural 
inclinations, which are purely selfish ; and 
reason points out the means by which these 
may be satisfied. Now it is of course true 
that reason enables a man to be selfish : it is, 
in fact, the prerogative of a rational being 
to be capable of selfishness. To be rational 
is to be a self, and to be a self is to be capable 
of selfishness. But no being is capable of 



248 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

selfishness who is not also capable of unself- 
ishness. When Mr. Kidd, like Hume, makes 
reason the "slave of the passions/' he seems 
to be totally unaware that any one has ever 
challenged this palpable fallacy. The " pas- 
sions," or "natural inclinations," are not selfish. 
It is only when they are interpreted by reason, 
or made a self-conscious end, that they become 
selfish. To eat when one is hungry is not 
selfish, but it may become an instance of self- 
ishness if a man eats what belongs to some- 
body else. To be selfish or unselfish is, 
therefore, a rational form of activity, and is 
possible only to a rational being. Mr. Kidd 
first assumes the natural inclinations to be 
selfish, and then assumes that a rational being 
will forfeit his reason if he looks beyond his 
natural inclinations. But if he is rational, he 
must look beyond his natural inclinations ; 
and when he does so, his reason will be of a 
very narrow and irrational type, if he is unable 
to learn from experience that he can find sat- 
isfaction only in the development of all his 
powers, and that this development is possible 
only by seeking the good of all. Moreover, 



IDEALISM AND HUMAN PROGRESS 249 

on Mr. Kidd's own showing, the natural incli- 
nations of man have been inherited from his 
animal progenitors. But the animals care for 
others as well as themselves, and hence if 
reason is merely an instrument for the satis- 
faction of the natural wants, must its function 
not be as much social as selfish ? 

If Mr. Kidd's conception of " reason " is in- 
adequate, how shall we characterise his idea 
of " religion," which he describes as " ultra- 
rational" or "supernatural"? These epithets 
do not mean, in Mr. Kidd's mouth, what they 
are apt to suggest to the unwary reader. Re- 
ligion is not, in his view, of divine or ultra- 
human origin. " The religious feeling," as he 
explains, " is not only just as much a part of 
man's nature as any other, but it is the most 
characteristic part of it. . . . It is not beyond 
him : it is only beyond his reason." * What, 
then, is religion ? Finding the definitions 
hitherto given unsatisfactory, Mr. Kidd gives 
one of his own. " A religion is a form of 
belief, providing an ultra-rational sanction for 
that large class of conduct in the individual 

* Nineteenth Century, February, 1895, p. 232, note. 



250 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

where his interests and the interests of the 
social organism are antagonistic, and by which 
the former are rendered subordinate to the 
latter in the general interests of the evolution 
which the race is undergoing." # Now, in the 
first place, this is not a definition of religion 
at all ; it attempts to tell us what religion does, 
not what it is. But, secondly, the explanation 
of this defect is that religion is conceived 
simply as a blind impulse, and is therefore 
indefinable. For we are told that a religion 
" must necessarily maintain itself by what is 
often a vast system of beliefs and ordinances," 
but which " fall under the head of theology." t 
But when we have purified religion of all its 
" beliefs and ordinances," what remains ? Ob- 
viously every object of religion will disappear, 
and in the absence of an object there can be 
nothing but an unreasoning impulse, operating 
blindly in the direction of the social good. It 
is not surprising that Mr. Kidd should speak 
of religion as " beyond reason " ; one is only 
surprised that he did not describe it as " be- 
neath reason." 

* Kidd's Social Evolution, p. 103. f Ibid. p. 104. 



IDEALISM AND HUMAN PROGRESS 25 1 

Now we have already seen that " reason " is 
for Mr. Kidd the organ of the purely selfish 
inclinations. Combining our two results, we 
reach the conclusion that human progress is 
the resultant of two blind tendencies, — a 
selfish and a social, — the latter being stronger 
than the former. If this is true, we need not 
trouble ourselves about the future of the race, 
and indeed to do so would be superfluous, 
since the future will be determined by the stress 
of the stronger impulse. The only refutation 
such a doctrine needs is to be plainly stated. 
It would be hard to say whether in it reason 
or religion is most degraded ; and, in truth, 
the degradation of the one is the necessary 
counterpart of the degradation of the other. 
Reason must be religious and religion rational, 
or human progress is inconceivable. 

A clear conception of what is meant by 
calling man " rational " is so important that I 
may be excused for adding a few words on 
this point. It is a fundamental mistake to 
assume that " reason " is absolutely exclusive 
of feeling. To be " rational " is not to be a 
purely intellectual machine, the function of 



252 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

which is to manipulate what Mr. Bradley calls 
" bloodless categories." Such a being cannot 
be conceived as even possible, for it is mani- 
fest that, having no interest in one object 
more than another, his intellect would never 
get into play at all. Nor, again, is " reason " 
exclusive of will: in truth, will is the activity 
of a rational being, and only of a rational 
being. Hence the fundamental mistake of 
writers like Schopenhauer and Von Hartmann, 
who speak of the " will " of a plant or animal, 
and even of a stone, not seeing that no being 
has will that is not self-conscious. And of 
course " reason " implies knowledge, i.e. the 
conception of a real object as present to a 
subject. Thus " reason" involves the three 
correlative aspects of feeling, willing, and know- 
ing ; and no living being can be " rational," or 
indeed can be conceived, who merely feels, or 
merely knows, or merely wills. It is therefore 
manifest that " reason " is not a special faculty 
possessed by self-conscious beings, but ex- 
presses what is implied in their nature as 
self-conscious. And as in man self-conscious- 
ness is not an endowment, but a process, the 



IDEALISM AND HUMAN PROGRESS 253 

rational life is necessarily progressive. Com- 
plete self-consciousness is the goal of all 
human effort; and complete self-consciousness 
would consist in experiencing the world, the 
self, and God in the totality of their relations 
to one another. As none of these objects can 
be separated from the others, we are compelled 
to infer that the principle which gives mean- 
ing to all existence must be self-conscious or 
rational. And as this principle must be con- 
ceived as ultimate, the only conception of 
reality which is beyond doubt is that of a 
self-determining, self-conscious, and self-mani- 
festing reason. 

This conclusion, as it seems to me, cannot 
be avoided by any one who takes a comprehen- 
sive view of evolution. From the evolutionist 
point of view the meaning of the earlier stages 
must be interpreted in the light of the final 
stage, for it is only in the final stage that reality 
as a whole reveals what it truly is. But as the 
last stage, that of self-conscious reason, is incon- 
ceivable without the prior stages, we must 
refer these prior stages as well as the last to a 
single principle. Nor is it difficult to see that, 



2 54 THE CHRIST! A AT IDEAL OF LIFE 

in a universe which is the expression of reason, 
the inviolability of natural law is a necessary 
presupposition. A universe without law is a 
contradiction in terms : it would be a universe 
in which there was no order or coherence. 
Reason, it is true, is not mere conformity to 
law, but without conformity to law there can be 
no reason. And as in the supreme rational 
principle there can be no evolution from a 
lower to a higher form, — which would involve 
the absurdity of an infinite principle which was 
finite, — there can be no evolution in the world 
which is inconsistent with the fundamental 
condition of there being a world at all, namely, 
that it must be a cosmos. It is the tacit recog- 
nition of this necessity of thought which leads 
the scientific man to attach so much importance 
to the inviolability of natural law. To deny 
that inviolability, as he feels, is to make all 
science impossible. Thus he conceives of 
nature as a system of laws, the same yesterday, 
to-day, and forever. What dominates his mind 
is at bottom the same idea as that which in 
another form led the Hebrew prophet to speak 
of " the law of the Eternal." But, as " natural 



IDEALISM AND HUMAN PROGRESS 255 

law " is, from the evolutionist point of view, 
nothing but a form in which the divine reason 
is partially expressed, it is obvious that it can 
no longer be regarded as an external necessity 
imposed upon man from without, to which he 
must submit because he cannot escape from its 
remorseless grasp. Why should he desire to 
escape from the very principle without which 
he could not even exist ? Without the fixed 
order and system of physical nature, the subse- 
quent stages of evolution would be impossible ; 
and hence the attempt to find breaks in the 
order, or in the evolution of the world, is a 
blind attempt to convert the universe into 
chaos. 



CHAPTER XI 

IDEALISM AND CHRISTIANITY 

The conclusion to which we have been 
brought is that the ultimate conception by 
means of which existence must be explained 
is that of a self-conscious and self-determin- 
ing principle. Now it is important to see 
precisely what is involved in this conception, 
and to remove from it all elements which 
are inconsistent with its purity and with the 
position assigned to it as the only adequate 
explanation of the world as a whole. A 
thorough discussion of this topic would de- 
mand a complete system of metaphysic, but 
it may be possible in brief compass to show 
the inadequacy of certain definitions of God 
or the absolute, and to indicate the defini- 
tion which it would be the task of a com- 
pletely reasoned system to establish. When 

this has been done, an attempt will be made 

256 



IDEALISM AND CHRISTIANITY 257 

to give an outline of the relation of the 
world, and especially of man, to the abso- 
lute. A consideration of these two questions 
will of itself be sufficient to show that Ideal- 
ism is in essential harmony with the Chris- 
tian ideal of life, as held by the Founder of 
Christianity, however it may differ, at least 
in form, from popular Christian theology. 

(1) The absolute is very inadequately con- 
ceived when it is defined simply as sub- 
stance. This view is the inevitable result of 
opposing mind and nature, or thought and 
reality, to each other as abstract opposites. 
For, if mind excludes nature and nature 
mind, we are compelled to seek for the unity 
of both in that which is neither, but is some- 
thing beyond both. This "something," how- 
ever, cannot be further defined, and hence it 
remains for knowledge absolutely indetermi- 
nate. Now it is strangely supposed that such 
an elimination of the distinction of nature 
and mind is the logical result of the idealis- 
tic conception of the absolute. When it is 
maintained that there can be no abstract 
separation of mind and nature, subject and 



258 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

object, it is argued that mind and nature are 
identified, and hence it is said that we must 
fall back upon a unity which is manifested 
indifferently in both. This objection seems 
to me to rest upon a misconception of what 
Idealism affirms. What is really maintained 
is that the conception of nature as an inde- 
pendent reality is a conception which, if 
taken in its strict sense, contradicts itself. If 
nature is an independent reality, it can have 
in it no principle of unity. For the highest 
principle by which it can be determined is 
that of the interdependence of its parts, and 
this principle still leaves the parts external 
to one another, while it explains the process of 
nature as the changes which are produced in 
each part by the action upon it of the others. 
But such a conception does not take us be- 
yond the idea of an aggregate of parts only 
externally or mechanically related to one 
another. On the other hand, when mind is 
separated from nature, it can only be con- 
ceived as an abstract unity which, as having 
no differences within itself, must for ever 
remain in its abstractness. Now Idealism re- 



IDEALISM AND CHRISTIANITY 259 

fuses to admit that nature and mind are thus 
separated. It regards nature as the manifes- 
tation of mind, and mind as the principle of 
unity implied in nature. Hence, for the me- 
chanical conception of nature as a system of 
interdependent parts undergoing correspon- 
dent changes, is substituted the organic idea 
of nature as a system which develops towards 
an end. This view transforms the concep- 
tion of nature, not by denying that it is a 
system, but by regarding it as a system 
which is rational, and therefore is intelligible 
to all beings in whom reason operates. Now, 
if we have to interpret nature from the point 
of view of reason, the key to nature is to be 
found in mind. Hence the absolute cannot 
be adequately conceived merely as the unity 
which is beyond the distinction of nature 
and mind, but only as the unity which is 
implicit in nature and explicit in mind. 
When, therefore, we seek to determine the 
relation of particular forms of being to 
the absolute, the question is how far each 
is the explicit manifestation of rationality. 
No form of reality can be regarded as " mere 



260 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

appearance," but only as the more or less 
adequate manifestation of the principle which 
is the source and explanation of all reality. 
When, therefore, we speak of an "individual" 
reality, we must remember that its individu- 
ality is constituted by its relation to the whole. 
On the other hand, an individual reality can- 
not be defined as nothing but the sum of its 
relations to other individual realities. The 
conception of reality as determined purely by 
the relations of one thing to another over- 
looks the principle of unity which is present 
in all alike. This is true even of inorganic 
things. Each atom of oxygen or hydrogen is 
nothing apart from its relations, but each par- 
ticipates in the universal, so that an atom of 
each is always determined by the relations 
into which it is capable of entering, while 
yet it manifests the character peculiar to all 
atoms of its own kind. The individuality in 
this case is of a very simple character. Much 
more obvious is the principle of individuality 
in the case of living beings, which do not 
persist in the same unchangeable relations, 
but exhibit a whole series of relations to the 



IDEALISM AND CHRISTIANITY 26 1 

environment. Hence we can only describe 
the nature of a living being by pointing out 
the cycle of changes through which it passes. 
The living being is thus distinguished from 
the non-living by the greater complexity of 
its relations, and by the more express exhibi- 
tion of its individual unity. But it is espe- 
cially in self-conscious beings that individuality 
and universality reach their higher stage. 
Speaking generally, we must therefore say 
that a being is more truly individual, the more 
perfectly it contains within itself the principle 
of the whole. We cannot therefore say that 
the absolute is manifested equally in all be- 
ings; indeed, strictly speaking, it is only in 
self-conscious beings that the true nature of 
the absolute is revealed. Now, if it is true 
that only as reason is developed in a being 
does it express what is the true principle of 
the whole, it is manifest that the absolute 
cannot be realised, as it truly is, in beings 
lower than man, and that even in man it is 
not realised in its absolute completeness. 
By this conception of the immanence of the 
absolute in all forms of being, together with 



262 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

the recognition that in man at his best the 
absolute is most fully manifested, we are en- 
abled to see that the conception of the abso- 
lute as merely the unchanging substance 
which persists in all forms of changing 
existence is quite inadequate. Such a con- 
ception, on the one hand, abolishes all the 
distinctions of one being from another, mak- 
ing them all equally unreal; and, on the other 
hand, it denies that the absolute is a self- 
revealing subject, immanent in all forms of 
being, but manifested truly only in those that 
are self-conscious. 

(2) The absolute is inadequately conceived 
when it is defined as the power which is 
manifested in all particular forms of reality, 
or, in other words, simply as the first cause 
or creator of the world. The conception of 
power or force is that of a negative activity 
which manifests itself in overcoming some 
other power which is opposed to it. The 
mechanical conception of energy is the " power 
of doing work," and is always explained as 
manifested in opposition to that which resists 
it. All energy is therefore by its very nature 



IDEALISM AND CHRISTIANITY 263 

limited. When, therefore, we speak of infinite 
power, we virtually transcend the conception 
of energy, for " infinite " power must be the 
energy which includes in itself all forms of 
energy. Such a conception takes us beyond 
the conception of power altogether. The 
only kind of power which can be called infi- 
nite is that power which is self-determinant, 
and such a power is found only in self-con- 
scious energy, which is truly infinite because 
it returns upon itself or preserves its unity 
in all its manifestations. In self-conscious 
energy, object and subject are identical. In 
man this energy of self-consciousness is not 
complete, because man is not completely self- 
conscious. But in the absolute there must 
be complete self-consciousness. Now, if we 
are compelled to conceive of the absolute as 
complete self-consciousness, there is in the 
absolute the perfect unity of subject and ob- 
ject. And as such a unity admits of no 
degrees, there can be no absolute origination 
of reality, for this would mean the absolute 
origination of some phase of the absolute. 
The ordinary conception of creation as the 



264 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

origination of the world out of nothing con- 
veys a truth in the form of a self-contradiction : 
it expresses the idea of self-determining activ- 
ity in the imaginative form of a transition from 
nothing to reality as taking place in time. 
A blank nothing is imagined, which is at 
bottom merely the abstraction from all deter- 
minate reality, and then it is imagined that 
this blank nothing is succeeded by determi- 
nate reality. The conception of causality, as 
it is employed in determining the relation of 
one phase of reality to another, is transferred 
to the relation between the absolute and de- 
terminate reality. Now, as we have seen, the 
conception of causal connexion has no mean- 
ing except as expressing the dependence of 
particular phases of reality upon one an- 
other, and ultimately we are compelled to rec- 
ognise that such interdependence of particular 
phases of reality presupposes a self-determin- 
ing principle. When we have reached this 
point of view, we have transcended the cate- 
gory of causality, and it is therefore inadmis- 
sible to employ it in seeking to explain the 
relation of the parts to the whole. But this 



IDEALISM AND CHRISTIANITY 265 

is what is done in the ordinary conception 
of creation, though the inadequacy of the con- 
ception is virtually admitted when the creation 
of the world is figured as the origination of it 
from nothing. For u nothing " is represented 
as if it were a material to which a definite 
form was given by the action upon it of an 
external cause. It is obvious that this crude 
way of conceiving the relation of the world to 
the absolute must be discarded. The world 
cannot be separated from the absolute, but 
must be regarded as the manifestation or ob- 
jectification of the absolute, or, in other words, 
as the absolute itself regarded in its abstract 
opposition to itself. This opposition, how- 
ever, is merely a distinction ; for that which is 
opposed to the absolute is the absolute itself. 
(3) The absolute is not adequately con- 
ceived as a person, although no doubt the 
conception of personality is much more ade- 
quate as a predicate of the absolute than that 
of power. By a " person " we mean a being 
that is an individual, and, further, an indi- 
vidual who is capable of conceiving himself 
as a self. But personality emphasises the ex- 



266 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

elusive aspect of self-activity, and thus one 
person is separated from and opposed to 
another. On this basis of exclusive selfhood 
all rights are based, a right being the expres- 
sion of the self in that which has no self. 
Now, so far as the absolute is affirmed to be 
a person, the main idea is that the absolute 
is self-conscious, and to this extent it is true 
that the absolute is a person. But the abso- 
lute is not properly conceived as a person in 
the sense of being an exclusive self-centred 
individual. The conception of personality is 
inadequate even when applied to man, for it 
is not true that man is merely a person. The 
first consciousness of exclusive or adverse re- 
lations to others must be supplemented by 
the conception of man as essentially spirit, 
that is, as a being whose true self is found 
in relation to what is not self. Man is there- 
fore not adequately conceived as an exclusive 
self, but only as a self whose true nature is to 
transcend his exclusiveness and to find himself 
in what seems at first to be opposed to him. 
In other words, man is essentially self-separa- 
tive: he must go out of his apparently self- 



IDEALISM AND CHRISTIANITY 267 

centred life in order to find himself in a truer 
and richer life. This conception of a self- 
opposing subject must be applied to the ab- 
solute. The absolute is not an abstract 
person, but a spirit, i.e. a being whose essen- 
tial nature consists in opposing to itself beings 
in unity with whom it realises itself. This 
conception of a self-alienating or self-distin- 
guishing subject seems to me the fundamental 
idea which is expressed in the doctrine of the 
Trinity. We can conceive nothing higher 
than a self-conscious subject, who, in the in- 
finite fulness of his nature, exhibits his per- 
fection in beings who realise themselves in 
identification with him. What Schiller ex- 
presses in a figurative way seems to me to 
be the necessary result of philosophy: — 

" Freundlos war der grosse Weltenmeister, 
Flihlte Mangel, darum schuf er Geister, 

Serge Spiegel seiner Seligkeit. 
Fand das hochste Wesen schon kein Gleiches, 
Aus dem Kelch des ganzen Wesenreiches 
Schaumt ihm die Unendlichkeit." 

There is at present a tendency to main- 
tain that the absolute must be defined as 



268 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

something higher than a self-conscious sub- 
ject. This view seems to me to rest upon 
the false assumption that the distinction of 
subject and object is a mark of limitation. 
But it can only be a mark of limitation on 
the supposition that the object is in some 
way disparate from the subject, i.e. contains 
an element which is incomprehensible. The 
view which is here maintained is that, in the 
absolute, subject and object are absolutely 
identical; in other words, that the subject is 
its own object. If it is objected that in that 
case there is no distinction between them, 
the answer is that as the subject compre- 
hends all reality, there is in the absolute no 
distinction between subject and object, but 
there is an infinity of distinctions within the 
absolute. The absolute, in other w T ords, is 
essentially self-distinguishing. 

To this conception of the absolute an objec- 
tion may be raised, based upon the idea of 
evolution. According to the philosophical in- 
terpretation of evolution given above, the true 
nature of the absolute is revealed only in the 
last stage of evolution, and as, in this stage, 



IDEALISM AND CHRISTIANITY 269 

rational or self-conscious life emerges, ration- 
ality or self-consciousness, as it is fairly main- 
tained, must be predicated of the absolute. 
But if the world has already gone through 
various stages, — the cosmical, chemical, bio- 
logical, and rational, — why should it not have 
still other stages to go through ? Why should 
not the absolute reveal itself to future ages in 
higher forms, forms as much beyond the self- 
conscious as the self-conscious is beyond the 
stages prior to it? There is nothing in the 
principle of evolution, it may be said, to pre- 
clude this supposition. Man, at every stage in 
his development, has been prone to imagine 
that he had reached the ultimate conception of 
reality, and therefore the majority of men have 
always for a time stubbornly resisted the new 
and higher conception to which the best minds 
of the age have been irresistibly drawn. Must 
we not, then, refuse to admit that the concep- 
tion of the absolute as self-conscious is ulti- 
mate ? It is not meant that the absolute may 
in future ages be discerned to be lower than 
self-conscious, but that it may then be con- 
ceived, and to some extent is now conceived, as 



270 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

higher than self-conscious. Can we, in any 
case, conceive of the absolute as it is in itself? 
Must not even our highest idea of it be analogi- 
cal? Surely the absolute must in its inner 
nature infinitely transcend its manifestations as 
known to us. 

This new argument for the unknowability of 
the absolute seems to me to lead to the same 
abyss of emptiness as the old. If the absolute 
is super-rational or beyond self-consciousness, 
we can form no conception whatever of its 
nature ; for with the abolition of the distinction 
and unity of subject and object, all definite 
thought disappears in an abstract being which 
is for us pure nothing. It is a gratuitous as- 
sumption that a super-rational absolute is higher 
than a self-conscious absolute. How can we 
possibly speak of an object of which we know 
nothing, as either higher or lower than that 
which we do know? Such predicates have a 
meaning only within the sphere of our know- 
ledge, not beyond it. It is not possible to limit 
a conception by a mere negation. If I say 
that the conception of the world as a purely 
mechanical system is inadequate, I do so 



IDEALISM AND CHRISTIANITY 27 1 

because I possess the higher conception of 
the world as the manifestation of a self-crea- 
tive principle. I examine the conception of 
a world in which one element is referred to 
another, this second to a third, and so on ad 
infinitum ; and I come to the conclusion that 
such a conception of the world is inadequate, 
since ultimately I must posit a reality which is 
self-dependent and therefore self-originative. 
But, unless I had the higher conception, I 
should never discern the inadequacy of the 
lower. Any one, therefore, who maintains that 
the absolute must be conceived as beyond the 
distinction of subject and object, must have a 
positive conception of this higher unity, or he 
is rejecting the only conception which has mean- 
ing for him in favour of a conception which is 
perfectly indefinite. In truth, a perfectly indefi- 
nite conception is not a conception at all, since 
all thought implies distinction. To maintain 
that the absolute may be beyond the distinction 
of subject and object is to say nothing whatever. 
This simple consideration seems to me to 
dispose of the objection to the conception of 
the absolute as self-conscious, which is drawn 



272 THE CHRISTIAN- IDEAL OF LIFE 

from the idea of evolution. To suppose a stage 
of evolution to arise when the distinction of 
subject and object will be transcended is self- 
contradictory, because with the disappearance 
of that distinction there would also disappear 
the distinction of one stage from another. The 
principle of evolution has meaning only for a 
rational or self-conscious being, and unless we 
are capable of comprehending the nature of 
reality we cannot affirm that there has been any 
evolution. A recent writer has gone so far as 
to suggest that, as our intelligence has been 
evolved from non-intelligence, we have no 
right to deny that, in some subsequent age of 
the world, our intelligence may develope into 
a form in which the principle of contradiction 
will be overthrown, so that what are now to us 
abstract opposites may then be seen to be iden- 
tical. But surely we have a right to deny what 
is absolute nonsense. Apparently the writer 
does not see that, in the hypothetical stage sug- 
gested by him, in which our intelligence has 
transcended all the distinctions which we now 
make, it will have transcended the distinction 
between one stage of evolution and another, 



IDEALISM AND CHRISTIANITY 273 

and will therefore deny that there has been any 
evolution. But if all evolution is an illusion, 
what meaning can there be in saying that our 
intelligence may evolve into a higher stage, in 
which the law of contradiction is transcended ? 
Any one who judges at all — and even to set 
up a false theory is to judge — must presuppose 
that his judgment means something; but it 
cannot mean anything, if to affirm may be to 
deny, and to deny may be to affirm. 

The supposition that the absolute may be 
super-rational is obviously untenable. At the 
same time there is a certain amount of truth in 
the contention that the absolute is not fully re- 
vealed in man. For in man the rational life is 
a process, and a process which is never com- 
plete, and indeed never can be complete ; in the 
absolute there must be process, because there 
is infinite self-conscious energy, but there can 
be no transition from lower to higher. We 
must agree with Mr. Bradley, that " progress 
and decay are alike incompatible with perfec- 
tion." * " The improvement or decay of the 
universe/' as he says, "seems nonsense, un- 

* Bradley's Appearance and Reality, p. 499. 
T 



274 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

meaning or blasphemous." # The absolute is 
self-complete, and apart from such self-com- 
pleteness it could not be self-originative or 
creative of other forms of being. But the per- 
fection of the absolute is destroyed if we either 
separate it from any form of finite being or give 
independent reality to any form of finite being. 
To suppose that the absolute is self-complete 
apart from the finite, is to fall into the absurdity 
of an absolute which is limited ; to affirm the 
independence of the finite is to set up a finite 
absolute. Thus we are brought face to face 
with the difficulty, that if human reason has no 
reality apart from the divine reason, we seem 
to be affirming that the former is merely a par- 
tial aspect of the latter, so that man is but the 
passive medium of the divine reason. Now 
Christianity solves this difficulty by the doc- 
trine of the Holy Spirit. It affirms at once 
that man is the author of his own destiny, and 
yet that he cannot realise his true life unless 
the spirit of God works in him. The Christian 
consciousness has always held fast by this idea, 
and the church has persistently refused to 

* Ibid. p. 501. 



IDEALISM AND CHRISTIANITY 275 

accept any compromise which would separate 
the unity of the divine and the human spirit. 
The language of St. Paul : "I am crucified 
with Christ; nevertheless I live, yet not I, but 
Christ liveth in me," has been echoed by pious 
minds in all ages: such language is in truth 
the spontaneous utterance of the religious con- 
sciousness. We have therefore to ask whether 
philosophical reflection does not enable us to 
see that we have here an idea which reason 
pronounces to be absolutely true. 

The main obstacle to an acceptance of the 
truth which is embodied in the doctrine of 
the Holy Spirit seems to me to arise from the 
mechanical way in which we are wont to con- 
ceive of the relation between the human and 
the divine spirit. Now this mode of concep- 
tion is inadequate even when applied to the 
physical world, and it becomes more and more 
inadequate the higher the object to which it is 
applied. As we have seen, the physical world 
is inexplicable except on pre-supposition of an 
eternal creative energy, which expresses itself 
in the incessant transformations constituting 
what may be called the life of nature. This 



276 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

creative energy is unthinkable apart from its 
manifestations, and yet these do not exhaust it, 
but constitute the phases in which its nature is 
expressed. On the other hand, no single phase 
is possible apart from the absolute nature of the 
whole, and therefore we have to conceive even 
this stage of the world as implying an organic 
unity or system, in which the whole determines 
the parts, while the parts are essential to the 
whole. If we treat any part as self-complete in 
its isolation, we fall into the untenable doctrine 
of atomic Materialism ; if we deny the reality 
of the parts, we commit ourselves to an equally 
untenable Pantheism ; we have therefore to 
affirm at once the reality of the parts in the 
whole, and of the whole in the parts. And 
when we pass to the second stage in the process 
of the world, we find the idea of organic unity 
forcing itself upon us still more persistently. 
Here we have a distinct advance towards in- 
dividuation and organic system, for chemical 
elements are not related to each other in the 
same indifferent way as particles which are 
viewed simply as exhibiting the stress of gravi- 
tation : certain elements will combine and 



IDEALISM AND CHRISTIANITY 277 

others will not, and they combine only in defi- 
nite proportions. A still more marked indi- 
viduality is displayed in living beings : here, 
in fact, we first have an individual in any well- 
marked sense. But living beings more per- 
fectly realise the idea of individuality, just 
because they contain the whole in themselves 
in a more explicit form. For the living being 
presupposes the whole system of the world as 
physical and chemical, and in its own organism 
it unites physical and chemical changes with 
the new and higher form of unity which consti- 
tutes its life. 

When finally we pass to rational beings, we 
find not only the manifestation of individuality 
in a higher sense, but we find also a closer 
relation to the whole. It is the special pre- 
rogative of the self-conscious being that for 
him not only his own individual life, but the 
life of all forms of existence, and even the 
ultimate principle of all existence, can be re- 
produced in idea. Thus he is at once the 
most truly individual, and the most truly uni- 
versal. The whole is present in him, not 
merely in the sense that he is affected by it, 



278 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

but in the sense that by his own self-con- 
scious activity he is capable of living in it 
in an ideal way ; it does not operate through 
him, but in him. It is true that he would 
not be self-active were not the whole what 
it is. Without gravitation there would be 
no system of nature, without chemical affinity 
there would be no life, and without life there 
would be no mind. And yet mind is not 
a mere external synthesis of physical, chemi- 
cal, and vital forces, but a new form of reality 
including and transcending these. Man is 
thus a self-active or self-determining being, 
not because he is separable from the whole, 
but because he is capable of living in the 
whole. The creative activity which is pres- 
ent in all forms of being is present also in 
man, but in man it is present through his 
self-activity. Thus while he can know noth- 
ing which is not a manifestation of the abso- 
lute, and realise nothing which is contradictory 
of its nature, and experience no permanent sat- 
isfaction which is not the reflex of his unity 
with it, he could neither know, will, nor feel, 
were he not self-determinant or free. The 



IDEALISM AND CHRISTIANITY 279 

absolute, in other words, in the case of man, 
expresses its originative activity in the pro- 
duction of beings, who are themselves self- 
active or free, though not self-creative. Man 
is not free in the sense of being self-originat- 
ing, but he is free in the sense of being able 
to comprehend the nature of the absolute, 
and to bring his life into harmony with it; 
he is also free in the sense of being able to 
live in opposition to that revelation of the 
absolute w T hich in more or less explicit form 
is inseparable from his self-consciousness. 
Human life is, therefore, a life of moral re- 
sponsibility. The divine spirit can be present 
in man only as man is conscious of it, and 
identifies himself with it. Thus we can see 
how the Holy Spirit may be immanent in 
man, while yet man lives in the freedom of a 
"son of God." It is in this sense that I 
should maintain the immanence of God in 
man ; what is affirmed is the union of spirit 
with spirit, not the external and mechanical 
relation of one force as acting upon another. 
If the mechanical conception is inadequate 
to express the unity of the distinguishable 



280 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

elements in the physical world, how much 
more inadequate must it be to express the 
self-conscious unity of man with God. 

I think we may now conclude that the Chris : 
tian conception of God and man is not only in 
harmony with the results of modern science 
and historical criticism, when these are inter- 
preted from the comprehensive and self-con- 
sistent point of view of an idealistic or spiritual 
philosophy, but that the principle of Christian- 
ity thus acquires a definiteness and persuasive 
force which is attainable in no other way, and 
which is missed by those who shut themselves 
up within the narrow circle of traditional forms 
of thought. The results of science and phi- 
losophy are no doubt hostile to many cherished 
prejudices which are due to the survival of 
pagan or mediaeval superstitions, but they can- 
not touch the living heart of Christianity itself. 

It has already been maintained that the 
world, as the manifestation of God, is pur- 
posive. It must be observed, however, that 
this purpose is not something superadded to 
the world, but is implied in its very nature. 
It is important to make this observation, be- 



IDEALISM AND CHRISTIANITY 28 1 

cause the whole objection to the teleological 
view of the world arises from confusing 
mechanical with immanent teleology. The 
idealistic view is therefore hostile to the con- 
ception of Providence as the external adapta- 
tion of events to an end. Mr. Balfour tells 
us that one cannot " think of evolution in a 
God-created world without attributing to its 
Author the notion of purpose slowly worked 
out." # It is of course obvious that the con- 
ception of God implies that the process of 
evolution is towards an end ; but this process 
cannot be adequately described as a " prefer- 
ential exercise of divine power." We cannot 
conceive of the world as first created, and 
then directed towards an end. The reality 
of the world implies the continuous self- 
determination of God, and this self-determi- 
nation involves the process by which the 
world is maintained as an organic whole. 
We cannot, therefore, separate the evolution 
of the world from its existence. If we do 
so, we fall into the difficulty urged by Kant 
against the argument from design, that we 

* Foundations of Belief, p. 328. 



282 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

presuppose a " matter " to which the divine 
Architect gives shape. Such a "matter" is 
unthinkable. The nearest approach we can 
make to it is in some such conception as that 
of the primitive matter from which, according 
to the nebular theory, the complex forms of 
our solar system have been evolved. But in 
this nebulous matter there is already implied 
the " promise and potency " of all forms of 
life, and hence it can only be called " matter " 
in the relative sense of being a less developed 
form of the world than is realised in the sub- 
sequent stages of evolution. The purpose, 
then, w T hich must be affirmed is not exter- 
nally added to the world, but is already im- 
plied in the very existence of the world. The 
world is an organic whole, in which each part 
exists and has its proper nature only in and 
through the others. Hence the evolution 
from lower to higher forms is not a matter 
of accident, but is inseparable from the exist- 
ence of the world. A distinction, however, 
must be drawn between different orders of 
being. It is only in the case of man that we 
can speak not only of evolution, but of con- 



IDEALISM AND CHRISTIANITY 28 ^ 

scious evolution or progress. The scientific 
doctrine of evolution has enabled us to see 
that the law of all finite forms of being is a 
law of development; in other words, that the 
real is not the actual as it first appears in 
time, but the ideal which is implicit in the 
actual, and which is present in it as the 
active principle determining the process in 
which it is manifested. In the case of beings 
lower than man this process does not reach 
the stage of a self-conscious development ; or, 
at least, even the highest animals have only 
an indefinite consciousness of self, and, there- 
fore, can hardly be said to be capable of 
ideals. Man, however, not only develops, 
but he is capable of grasping the law of 
his own development, and, therefore, of con- 
trasting with his immediate self an ideal of 
himself in which is embodied his conception 
of what he ought to be, as distinguished 
from what he is. This capability of return- 
ing upon himself and setting up ideals is 
the fundamental condition of human progress. 
The ideal, however, while it is contrasted 
with the actual, is never in contradiction to 



284 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

the actual ; it is but the actual grasped in its 
ideal nature, as that end towards which all 
prior development has been striving. Were 
it otherwise, the progress of man would be 
impossible. It is thus obvious that, on the 
one hand, progress consists in conformity to 
the purpose which is involved in the whole 
nature of things, and, on the other hand, 
that this purpose can be realised only through 
the free activity of man. The spiritual life 
of man cannot be imparted to him from 
without; it consists in the conscious realisa- 
tion of the ideal. It is, therefore, a very 
inadequate conception of life which is ex- 
pressed in the formula that there is a " Power 
not ourselves which makes for righteousness." 
The " Power " which makes for righteousness 
is the conscious willing of righteousness, i.e. 
the conception and realisation of the meaning 
of the world. It is true that righteousness 
can be realised only because it is the true 
law of man's being ; but it is a law which 
operates only in and through his self-con- 
scious life. 

It is, then, the very nature of all finite 



IDEALISM AND CHRISTIANITY 285 

forms of being that their reality consists in 
a process by which they come to be what in 
idea they are. In the case of man, whose 
development is a self-conscious process, the 
development of goodness consists in the tran- 
scendence of his immediate or natural life. 
So far as the life of man is merely natural, 
he is neither good nor evil ; it is only because 
he is capable of abstracting from the imme- 
diate life of feeling that he is moral. And 
with this capacity is bound up the possi- 
bility of willing evil. The question as to the 
existence of evil has been obscured by the 
manner in which the problem has been put. 
The church fathers, conceiving of man as 
independently created, maintained that he 
was originally perfect in wisdom and holi- 
ness, and that evil was introduced into the 
world by the sin of the first man. It need 
hardly be said that this explanation not only 
explains nothing, but is self-contradictory and 
out of harmony with all that we know of 
primitive man. It explains nothing, because 
moral evil cannot be externally transferred 
from one person to another ; the very idea of 



286 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

moral evil being that it proceeds from a free 
act. It is self-contradictory, because a perfect 
being could have no disposition to will evil. 
And it is incompatible with the results of 
scientific discovery, which make it certain 
that primitive man began at the lowest and 
not the highest stage. The state of perfec- 
tion ascribed to primitive man is, therefore, 
the goal and not the starting-point of human- 
ity. Man was, therefore, in his original state 
evil, in the sense that evil is inseparable from 
the life of a being who can attain to good 
only through freedom, which involves the 
freedom to fall into error and evil. The 
original state of man was one in which he 
had the most inadequate conception of the 
world, himself, and God. The progress of 
man has involved a continual struggle with 
the cruder ideal of an earlier age. The spir- 
itual life is not a primitive endowment, but 
the result of long-continued pain and travail. 
Evil is not an accident ; it is inseparable from 
the process by which man transcends his im- 
mediate life. It is only through the ex- 
perience of evil that man has obtained a 



IDEALISM AND CHRISTIANITY 287 

consciousness of the depths as well as the 
heights of his nature. On the other hand, 
the process of human life has been a contin- 
ual transcendence of evil. The desire of man 
is for goodness and God, and his experience 
that evil is in contradiction to his true self 
makes it impossible for him to rest in it. 
Hence even at the earliest stage man is 
never absolutely evil ; he hates his enemy, 
it is true, but he sacrifices his natural im- 
pulses, and even his life, for his family or 
tribe. Thus the imperfect development of 
his moral life is the counterpart of his im- 
perfect knowledge of himself. 

The deliverance of man from the evil which 
belongs to his nature, as a being whose life 
is a process, is possible only through the 
comprehension of himself as in his ideal 
nature identical with God. The mediaeval 
conception of salvation cannot be accepted 
in the form in which it is stated. Man, it 
was argued, might conceivably have been 
liberated from sin in two ways : either God 
might have pardoned him out of pure mercy, 
or man might have expiated his sin by a 



288 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

humility correspondent to the magnitude of 
his guilt. But the former, it was held, con- 
flicts with the justice of God; and the latter 
is impossible, because man could not undergo 
a humiliation proportionate to the self-asser- 
tion implied in disobedience to the will of 
God. Hence God offered up his Son in 
man's stead, thus reconciling infinite justice 
with infinite mercy. 

It is impossible to state this highly arti- 
ficial doctrine without seeing that it is the 
product of conflicting ideas which are not 
properly reconciled with each other. The 
starting-point is the conception of personal 
sin, one of the central ideas of Christianity. 
Sin is then identified with crime, and there- 
fore God is conceived as an inexorable judge. 
But sin is not crime, nor can God be re- 
garded as a judge. Crime is a violation of 
the personal rights of another ; it is an offence 
against the external order of the state, which 
must be expiated by an external punishment. 
Sin, on the other hand, is not a violation of 
rights, but a desecration of the ideal nature 
of the sinner, the willing of himself as in his 



IDEALISM AND CHRISTIANITY 289 

essence he is not. Hence sin requires no 
external punishment to bring it home to the 
sinner: it brings its own punishment with it 
in the destruction of the higher life, the real- 
isation of which is blessedness. In man, by 
virtue of the divine principle in him, the con- 
sciousness of God is bound up with the con- 
sciousness of himself, and he cannot do violence 
to the one without doing violence to the other. 
Hence God is not a judge, allotting punish- 
ment according to an external law, but the 
perfectly holy Being, by reference to whom 
man condemns himself. No external punish- 
ment can transform the inner nature. The 
criminal, after undergoing punishment, may 
be more hardened in crime than ever, and 
yet society must punish him, because its func- 
tion is to preserve the social bond, which by 
his act the criminal has assailed. But reli- 
gion has in view not the preservation of social 
order, but the regeneration of the individual : 
it deals with the inner nature of man, not 
with the result of his act upon society ; and 
hence, unless it transforms and spiritualises 
him, it entirely fails of its end. 

u 



290 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF LIFE 

The sin of Adam, according to the mediae- 
val theory, consisted in pride, or the attempt 
to equalise himself with God. The truth im- 
plied in this view is that in so far as man 
seeks to realise his true self in separation 
from God, and therefore in willing his own 
good in isolation from the good of his fellow- 
men, he brings upon himself spiritual death. 
But this truth is obscured by the vulgar 
notion that sin is the attempt of man to 
equalise himself with God, — a notion obvi- 
ously based upon the conception of God as 
a Ruler whose majesty must be asserted. 
This pagan conception, drawn mainly from 
the idea of Caesar, as the representative of 
order and law, is entirely foreign to the Chris- 
tian idea of God. Even Plato saw that " in 
God there can be no envy ; " and mediaeval 
thinkers themselves virtually deny this false 
conception of God, when they speak of the 
incarnation as an expression of the infinite 
love of God. Here, in fact, we come upon 
the only purely Christian idea in the whole 
doctrine. Stripped of its artificial form, what 
is affirmed is that it is the very nature of 



IDEALISM AND CHRISTIANITY 29 1 

God to communicate himself to finite beings ; 
that, loving his creatures with an infinite love, 
he can realise his own blessedness only in 
them. Man can therefore be saved from sin 
only as he realises in his own life the self- 
communicating spirit of God. In taking upon 
himself the burden of the race, he lives a 
divine life. This is the secret which Jesus 
realised in his life, and to have made this 
secret practically our own is to be justified 
by faith. 

The Christian ideal of life, as here under- 
stood, is broad enough to embrace all the 
elements which in their combination consti- 
tute the complex spirit of the modern world. 
Every advance in science is the preparation 
for a fuller and clearer conception of God ; 
every improvement in the organisation of 
society is a further development of that com- 
munity of free beings by which the ideal of 
an organic unity of humanity is in process 
of realisation; every advance in the artistic 
interpretation of the world helps to individu- 
alise the idea of the organic unity by which 
all things are bound together. The ideal of 



292 THE CHRISTIAX IDEAL OF LIFE 

the Church has tended to limit Christianity 
to the direct promotion of the moral ideal, 
to the exclusion of the more comprehensive 
ideal which recognises that the goal is the 
full development of all the means by which 
the full perfection of humanity is realised. 
The Christian ideal, as embodied in the teach- 
ing of Jesus, was free from this limitation. It 
saw God in the orderly processes of nature 
and in the beauty of the world, as well as in 
the loving service of humanity. In principle 
it therefore embraced all that makes for the 
higher life. The Christianity of our day 
must free itself from the narrow conception 
of life by which Protestantism has tended to 
limit its principle. It must recognise that 
the ideal of Christian manhood includes 
within it the Greek ideal of clear thought 
and the love of beauty, as well as the Jewish 
ideal of righteousness, and the Roman ideal 
of law and order, harmonising all by the 
divine principle of love to God and man, on the 
basis of that free spirit which has come to 
us mainly from our Teutonic ancestors. 



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